The repeated wars between France and England in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries had involved also their colonies in America and
India. In America the Indians had been employed as allies upon both
sides, and thus encouraged in their hideous deeds of massacre and
torture. Hence there had grown an ever-increasing bitterness between
the French in Canada and the English colonists along the Atlantic
coasts, and this finally led to the momentous French and Indian war,
which, contrary to the course of the earlier contests, originated in
America and spread thence to Europe.

Its immediate cause was the disputed possession of the interior of
the continent, the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. These had been
first explored by the French, and when English pioneers began to
penetrate thither the French built a chain of forts to resist them.
An expedition of Virginians under the command of their youthful
leader, Major George Washington, had a sharp encounter with the
enemy in 1754; and then the English government determined to assert
its authority by an overwhelming force. No war was declared against
France, nor even against Canada; but a distinguished English
general, Braddock, was sent over with three thousand regular troops
to seize the French forts in the Ohio Valley, especially Fort
Duquesne, on the site of the modern city of Pittsburg.

Braddock's expedition thus started the war which ended in the
expulsion of France from the North American continent. It did more
than that: it sowed the seeds of lasting dissension between the
American colonial troops and the British regulars. The British
despised their uninformed allies, and the latter soon learned in
their turn to despise the regulars.

The English general liked the young Virginian major, Washington, and
invited him, as one who knew the ground, to accompany the projected
expedition and give advice--which Braddock never took. Its caution
seemed to him to savor too much of cowardice, and he persisted in
marching through the wilderness toward Fort Duquesne as though his
forces had been upon parade, with drums beating and colors flying.
The French were very near to being frightened into flight, but
determined on making one effort at resistance. Its results are here
told by the standard Pennsylvania historian, Sargent, and also in