ural advantages of the district we
have just described. It became, emphatically, the bloody arena, in which
most of the battles for the mastery of the colonies were contested.
Forts were erected at the different points that commanded the facilities
of the route, and were taken and retaken, razed and rebuilt, as victory
alighted on the hostile banners. While the husbandman shrank back from
the dangerous passes, within the safer boundaries of the more ancient
settlements, armies larger than those that had often disposed of the
scepters of the mother countries, were seen to bury themselves in these
forests, whence they rarely returned but in skeleton bands, that were
haggard with care or dejected by defeat. Though the arts of peace were
unknown to this fatal region, its forests were alive with men; its
shades and glens rang with the sounds of martial music, and the echoes
of its mountains threw back the laugh, or repeated the wanton cry,
of many a gallant and reckless youth, as he hurried by them, in the
noontide of his spirits, to slumber in a long night of forgetfulness.

It was in this scene of strife and bloodshed that the incidents we
shall attempt to relate occurred, during the third year of the war
which England and France last waged for the possession of a country that
neither was destined to retain.

The imbecility of her military leaders abroad, and the fatal want of
energy in her councils at home, had lowered the character of Great
Britain from the proud elevation on which it had been placed by the
talents and enterprise of her former warriors and statesmen. No longer
dreaded by her enemies, her servants were fast losing the confidence
of self-respect. In this mortifying abasement, the colonists, though
innocent of her imbecility, and too humble to be the agents of her
blunders, were but the natural participators. They had recently seen a
chosen army from that country, which, reverencing as a mother, they
had blindly believed invincible--an army led by a chief who had been
selected from a crowd of trained warriors, for his rare military
endowments, disgracefully routed by a handful of French and Indians, and
only saved from annihilation by the coolness and spirit of a Virginian
boy, whose riper fame has since diffused itself, with the steady
influence of moral truth, to the uttermost confines of Christendom.* A
wide frontier had been laid naked by this unexpected disaster, and more
substantial evils were preced