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3 the French 3 The French and Indian War FOR SIXTY-FIVE YEARS FRANCE AND ENGLAND HAD WARRED IN­ tennittently with all the venom of business rivals over possession of the territory between the Mississippi River and the Allegheny Mountains. The prizes they sought included fisheries, land and the fur trade for which they fought the first three of the wars in vain. Now, in 1754, they resumed hostilities in the French and Indian War, which, in its broader European phase, is known as the Seven Years' War. The American phase began as a dispute over possession of the Ohio Valley and gradually involved a large part of North America. The French claims to the interior of the continent originated in 167 I when Daumont de Saint Luggon, swinging aloft his sword in the presence of awed Indian allies, proclaimed the sov­ ereignty of France of "all the countries, rivers, lakes, and streams ... both those which have been discovered and those which may be discovered hereafter, in all their strength and breadth, bounded on one side by the seas of the North and the West, and the other by the South Sea." Coincidentally, Batts and Fallam a few months later proclaimed the same territory for England. Thus with a few words a Frenchman and two English­ men were instrumental in plunging their countries and several others into a series of intercolonial wars which in the end con­ verted such widely scattered regions as the plains of India, the hinterland of Prussia and the forests of North America into bloody battlefields and which at the peace table changed the course of world history. In 1673 Louis Joliet, the son of a wagonmaker of Quebec, and 43 44 The Appalachian Frontier 'fOWN", S£T'TI..CMtWU" ,"01tTS" lYe. - -- ..,.eSENT $TAre aQUHCA"'f ....HI!$ o I020H40 ~ ICALC 01 "$1'£$ s. C. Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest, descended the Mississippi from the mouth of the Wisconsin to a point beyond the mouth of the Ohio and planted France in the heart of North America. A few years later La Salle dreamed of securing the region for his king by building across the Lake Country and down the Mississippi a chain of forts which would hem in the English colonies to the east and at the same time would serve as depositories of the royal fUf trade. The French and Indian War 45 When La Salle's dream faded with his tragic death on the banks of the Trinity, his mantle fell on the chivalrous shoulders of Pierre La Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, who with 200 men in 1699 built Fort Maurepas on Biloxi Bay. For some years the impover­ ished young Louisiana colony was run unsuccessfully by a wealthy merchant, Antoine de Crozat, and then by John Law's glittering bubble, the Company of the Indies. Eventually re­ turned to the Crown, it began to grow strong and to prosper despite the opposition of the Montreal merchants who prevailed upon the Crown to export all furs from the upper Mississippi through the St. Lawrence rather than down the river. Meanwhile, in 1718, on a malarious plain infested by snakes and alligators, John Baptiste La Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, brother of Iberville, laid the foundations of the present metropolis of New Orleans. Within twenty years the golden lilies of France were waving over the territory from New Orleans northward to the Ohio and the Missouri. Thousands of settlers planted them­ selves along the Mississippi, establishing Fort de Chartres in 1720, St. Philippe in 1723, Prairie du Rocher in 1733 and Vincennes­ which was to figure prominently in the campaigns of George Rogers Clark-in 1734. On the Alabama River the French built Fort Toulouse to establish trade with the Creek Indians. By the middle of the eighteenth century France began to real­ ize her dream of an unbroken empire stretching from New Or­ leans to Quebec and fortified by a chain of strongholds and trad- . ing posts connecting fur centers on the Mississippi with those on the St. Lawrence. Thanks to her skill and diligence, she was confident that she had stemmed the swelling tide of English colonization. At Niagara a fort commanded the entrance to the heart of North America. One at Detroit guarded the territory from Lake Erie to the north. Another at St. Mary's stood sen­ tinel to warn of any hostile approach to Lake Superior. Still another at Michilimackinac guarded the narrow channel between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. A fort at Green Bay and one at St. Joseph debarred these two routes to the Mississippi by the Wisconsin and Illinois rivers. Fort Ouiatenon on the Wabash and Fort Miami on the Maumee protected the trading highway from Lake Erie to the Ohio. Kaskaskia and Cahokia in the Illi- 46 The Appalachian Frontier nois Country were armed emporiums of the Indian trade. France had now only to prevent the English from overrunning the Ohio Valley whose strategic importance she had realized as early as 172 I when her difficulties with the Fox Indians forced her traders to shift their routes from the portage between the \Visconsin and Illinois to that between the Maumee and Wabash. They discovered that the new route shortened considerably the distance between the Canadian and the Louisiana settlenlents. The first British traders in the Ohio Valley were perhaps Caro­ linians and New Yorkers, whose visits were sporadic and incon­ sequential. Next came Pennsylvanians who had followed Shaw­ nee and Delawares in their migration westward to Kittanning and Logstown, near Economy, Beaver County, Pennsylvania. For deer, elk, buffalo and beaver skins the Pennsylvania traders exchanged rum, guns, gunpowder, lead, lace, thread, jewelry, ,vomen's stockings and other articles which they had bought from such merchants as Jeremiah 'Varder of Philadelphia and Joseph Simon and Levi Andrew Levy of Lancaster. Thanks to their aggressive and enterprising leader, George Croghan, a Dubliner who had migrated to America in 173 I, the Pennsylvanians soon dominated the trade in the upper Ohio Val­ ley. Croghan shortly opened trading centers at Pine Creek, Logs­ town and Beaver Creek, while his men with their pack horses came and went on trails that spread out like the sticks of a fan to the country of the Miami Indians and that of the Illinois Indians at the mouth of the Scioto. Croghan had reached French ,domain, but he was still unsatisfied. In 1748 he climaxed his prosperity by building a palisaded fort at the Miami village of Pickawillany, deep in French territory. Virginia claimed the Ohio Valley under the charter of 1609 and by the Batts and Fallam discovery of 167 I. Many of her leading citizens were resentful of what they regarded as the en­ croachments of Pennsylvania traders on her domain. To forestall them as well as to stem the French advance, Colonel Thomas Lee and twelve others, including Lawrence and Augustine Wash­ ington' half brothers of George Washingron, George Mason and John Hanbury, a Quaker merchant residing in London, peti- The French and Indian War 47 tioned the Board of Trade inEngland to organize a trading and speculating enterprise which became known as the Ohio Com­ pany. Anxious to strengthen English control in a region which France also claimed, the Board ofTrade approved the request and granted the company a tract of 200,000 acres free of quitrents for ten years, and promised it an additional award of 300,000 acres on condition of settling a hundred families on the original tract and of building and garrisoning a fort for their protection. Gov­ ernor Robert Dinwiddie, who became a member of the company, hoped it would serve as a powerful weapon in checking the French advance while it encouraged British progress. He knew that it would secure a good share of the Indian trade which hitherto had been monopolized by Croghan and his men. Moreover, possession by the company of a tract of land in a region disputed among the colonies would strengthen the claims of Virginia. To facilitate its success, Dinwiddie planned to rec­ oncile the southern and northern Indians, who, though allies of the English, were constantly at war with each other. The com­ pany failed to secure the required number of immigrants, but it became a keen competitor of the Pennsylvania traders. Its agent, Christopher Gist, established a storehouse at Wills Creek, now Cumberland, Maryland, and explored much of the region. France wasted no time in taking steps to regain lost ground. In 1749 La Galissoniere, the French governor, sent Pierre Joseph Celoron de Blainville to renew possession of the Ohio Country, to ascertain the attitude of the Indians and to expel the British traders. In pursuance of these aims, Celoron descended the Ohio, burying at important points along the river lead plates claiming the region for France. This exploit aroused the indig­ nation of the Indians, who interpreted it as evidence that the French meant to deprive them of the region. They therefore sided with the British traders with whom Celoron left, for the English governors, messages warning them against future tres­ passes in French territory. When the governors ignored these warnings, the French in 1752 established forts at Presque Isle, on the present site of Erie, Pennsylvania, farther south on French Creek at Waterford and at Fort Venango-now Franklin, Penn- 48 The Appalachian Frontier sylvania-at the junction of French Creek and the Allegheny River. On learning of these activities, Dinwiddie sent a small party under twenty-one-year-old George Washington to warn the French that they were on Virginia territory. The parry-, which included Christopher Gist as interpreter, made its way to Fort Le Boeuf at Waterford where the French commander, Legardeur de St.
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