site--today Pittsburgh--if occupied
and held by either nation would give that nation the command of the
Ohio. Occupied it was for a brief hour by a small party of Virginians,
under Captain William Trent; but no sooner had they erected on the spot
a crude fort than the French descended upon them. What happened then all
the world knows: how the French built on the captured site their great
Fort Duquesne; how George Washington with an armed force, sent by
Dinwiddie to recapture the place, encountered French and Indians at
Great Meadows and built Fort Necessity, which he was compelled to
surrender; how in the next year (1755) General Braddock arrived from
across the sea and set out to take Fort Duquesne, only to meet on the
way the disaster called "Braddock's Defeat"; and how, before another
year had passed, the Seven Years' War was raging in Europe, and England
was allied with the enemies of France.

>From the midst of the debacle of Braddock's defeat rises the figure
of the young Washington. Twenty-three he was then, tall and spare and
hardbodied from a life spent largely in the open. When Braddock fell,
this Washington appeared. Reckless of the enemy's bullets, which spanged
about him and pierced his clothes, he dashed up and down the lines in an
effort to rally the panic-stricken redcoats. He was too late to save
the day, but not to save a remnant of the army and bring out his own
Virginians in good order. Whether among the stay-at-homes and voters of
credits there were some who would have ascribed Washington's conduct on
that day to the fact that his brothers were large shareholders in the
Ohio Company and that Fort Duquesne was their personal property or
"private interest," history does not say. We may suppose so.

North Carolina, the one colony which had not "amus'd" the Governor of
Virginia "with Expectations that proved fruitless," had voted 12,000
pounds for the war and had raised two companies of troops. One of these,
under Edward Brice Dobbs, son of Governor Dobbs, marched with
Braddock; and in that company as wagoner went Daniel Boone, then in his
twenty-second year. Of Boone's part in Braddock's campaign nothing more
is recorded save that on the march he made friends with John Findlay,
the trader, his future guide into Kentucky; and that, on the day of
the defeat, when his wagons were surrounded, he escaped by slashing the
harness, leaping on the back of one of his horses, and dashing into the
forest.

Me