ishments.

[Footnote 136: "La Distinction qui convient a votre Dignitte a sa
Qualite et a son grand Merite." Copy of original letter sent by
Dinwiddie to Governor Hamilton.]

After leaving Venango on his return, he found the horses so weak that,
to arrive the sooner, he left them and their drivers in charge of
Vanbraam and pushed forward on foot, accompanied by Gist alone. Each was
wrapped to the throat in an Indian "matchcoat," with a gun in his hand
and a pack at his back. Passing an old Indian hamlet called Murdering
Town, they had an adventure which threatened to make good the name. A
French Indian, whom they met in the forest, fired at them, pretending
that his gun had gone off by chance. They caught him, and Gist would
have killed him; but Washington interposed, and they let him go.[137]
Then, to escape pursuit from his tribesmen, they walked all night and
all the next day. This brought them to the banks of the Alleghany. They
hoped to have found it dead frozen; but it was all alive and turbulent,
filled with ice sweeping down the current. They made a raft, shoved out
into the stream, and were soon caught helplessly in the drifting ice.
Washington, pushing hard with his setting-pole, was jerked into the
freezing river; but caught a log of the raft, and dragged himself out.
By no efforts could they reach the farther bank, or regain that which
they had left; but they were driven against an island, where they
landed, and left the raft to its fate. The night was excessively cold,
and Gist's feet and hands were badly frost-bitten. In the morning, the
ice had set, and the river was a solid floor. They crossed it, and
succeeded in reaching the house of the trader Fraser, on the
Monongahela. It was the middle of January when Washington arrived at
Williamsburg and made his report to Dinwiddie.

[Footnote 137: _Journal of Mr. Christopher Gist_, in _Mass. Hist. Coll.,
3rd Series_, V.]

Robert Dinwiddie was lieutenant-governor of Virginia, in place of the
titular governor, Lord Albermarle, whose post was a sinecure. He had
been clerk in a government office in the West Indies; then surveyor of
customs in the "Old Dominion,"--a position in which he made himself
cordially disliked; and when he rose to the governorship he carried his
unpopularity with him. Yet Virginia and all the British colonies owed
him much; for, though past sixty, he was the most watchful sentinel
against French aggression and its most strenuous opponent