Archer Butler Hulbert

“ 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. ”

“ Over the heroic and persistent efforts of George Washington, to make a feeble republic strong through unity, there is no obscurity. America won the West from England as England had won it from France—by conquest. Brave men were found who did what neither England nor France did do, settle the wilderness and begin the transformation of it. Large colonies of hardy men and women had gone into the Ohio valley, carrying in their hands the blessed Ordinance and guided by the very star of empire. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The fact that Washington chose Mount Braddock for his fort and battle-ground has, unfortunately, never been emphasized by historians.
The Great Meadows, sunny and fair, lie quietly between their hills dreaming even yet of the young hero whose name is indissolubly linked with their own. The gently sloping hills are now quite cleared of forests—save on the southeast, where, as in the old days, the forests still approach nearest the bottom land. ”

“ It is not to be doubted that George Washington knew the danger he courted, at least very much better than we can appreciate it today. He had not lived three years on the frontier for nothing. He had heard of these French—of their bold invasion of the West, their growing trade, their cunning conciliation of the Indian, their sudden passion for fort building when they heard of the grant of land to the Ohio Company, to which his brothers belonged. ”

“ 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 stand-still 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 the course of the shortest portage between the Potomac and Monongahela. It was the main trail to the Ohio over which Gist now guided the young envoy. This path had no name until it took that of a Delaware Indian, Nemacolin, who blazed its course, under the direction of Captain Thomas Cresap, for the Ohio Company. To those who love to look back to beginnings, and read great things in small, this Indian path, with its border of wounded trees, leading across the first great divide into the Central West, is worthy of contemplation. ”

“ Forgetting all else for the moment, consider the young leader of the floundering, stumbling army. 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 to Laurel Hill in one-fifth of the time that little army needed on that black night. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In so far as the English were more backward than the French in occupying the land, the unprejudiced Delawares and Mingoes were inclined to further English plans. When, a few years later, it became clear that the English cared not a whit for the rights of the red men, the latter hated and fought them as they never had the French. Washington was well fitted for handling this delicate matter of sharpening Indian hatred of the French and of keeping very still about English plans—his past experiences were now of utmost value to him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Acquiring, when a mere lad, a knowledge of mathematics, he had gone surveying in Lord Fairfax's lands on the south branch of the Potomac. There he spent the best of three years, far beyond the settled limits of Virginia, fortifying his splendid physique against days of stress to come. In other ways this life on his country's frontier was of advantage. Here he met the Indian—that race over which no man ever wielded a greater influence than Washington. ”

“ The animal life of the forests one can fancy, perhaps, with more accuracy than any other characteristic, for the deer and turkey, the wolf and buffalo of that day have their antitypes in ours. And yet here one might fall short, for few recall the vast flocks of pigeons that swarmed above the primeval forest, even darkening the heavens as though a cloud were passing, and blighting the trees in which they spent a night. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Washington writes to Harrison, in perhaps the most powerful appeal he ever made, "that the flanks and rear of the United States are possessed by other powers, and formidable ones too; nor how necessary it is to apply the cement of interest to bind all parts of the Union together by indissoluble bonds, especially that part of it which lies immediately west of us, with the Middle States. ”

“ The Indians did not object to these forts because they found that they were really no forts at all, but rather depots and warehouses for the great fur trade, where their heavy stacks of otter and sable and beaver skins could be exchanged for such splendid colored ribbons and tinkling bells, and powder, lead, and whiskey. Each fort became a trading post where the Indians gathered frequently for entertainments—of various character. ”

“ 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 the all-day's battle was fought between the Virginians behind their breastworks and in their trenches, and the French and Indians on the ascending wooded hillsides. The rain which began to fall soon flooded Mackaye's men out of their trenches. But no other change of position was made all day. And, so far as the battle went, the English doggedly held their own. In the contest with hunger and rain, however, they were fighting a losing battle. The horses and cattle escaped and were slaughtered by the enemy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The history of this West is a long history of war, from the earliest days even to our own century. This territory between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi is one of the greatest battle-fields in the world. It is certainly the oldest and most renowned in our America. ”