r's edge. The last plate was hidden where the Great
Miami joins the Ohio; and this done, Celoron crossed Ohio to Lake Erie
and went back to Montreal.[1]

[Footnote 1: Read T. J. Chapman's _The French in the Allegheny Valley_,
pp. 9-23, 187-197; Parkman's _Montcalm and Wolfe_, Vol. I., pp. 36-62;
Winsor's _The Mississippi Basin_, pp. 252-255.]

%77. The French build Forts on the Allegheny.%--This formal taking
possession of the valleys of the Allegheny and the Ohio was all well
enough in its way; but the French knew that if they really intended to
keep out the British they must depend on forts and troops, and not on
lead plates. To convince the French King of this, required time; so that
it was not till 1752 that orders were given to fortify the route taken
by Celoron in 1749. The party charged with this duty repaired to the
little peninsula where is now the city of Erie, and there built a log
fort which they called Presque Isle. Having done this, they cut a road
twenty miles long, to the site of Waterford, Pa., and built Fort Le
Boeuf, and later one at Venango, the present site of the town
of Franklin.

%78. Washington's First Public Service.%--The arrival of the French
in western Pennsylvania alarmed and excited no one so much as Governor
Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia. He had two good reasons for his
excitement. In the first place, Virginia, because of the interpretation
she placed on her charter of 1609, claimed to own the Allegheny valley
(see p. 33). In the second place, the governor and a number of Virginia
planters were deeply interested in a great land company called the Ohio
Company, to which the King of England had given 500,000 acres lying
along the Ohio River between the Monongahela and the Kanawha rivers, a
region which the French claimed, and toward which they were moving.

As soon, therefore, as Dinwiddie heard that the French were really
building forts in the upper Allegheny valley, he determined to make a
formal demand for their withdrawal, and chose as his messenger George
Washington, then a young man of twenty-one, and adjutant general of the
Virginia militia.

Washington's instructions bade him go to Logstown, on the Ohio, find out
all he could as to the whereabouts of the French, and then proceed to
the commanding officer, deliver the letter of Dinwiddie, and demand an
answer. He was especially charged to ascertain how many French forts had
been erected, how many soldiers there were in each, how