hree or four
hundred men. Two independent companies maintained by the King in New
York, and one in South Carolina, had received orders from England to
march to the scene of action; and in these, with the scanty levies of
his own and the adjacent province, lay Dinwiddie's only hope. With men
abundant and willing, there were no means to put them into the field,
and no commander whom they would all obey.

From the brick house at Williamsburg pompously called the Governor's
Palace, Dinwiddie despatched letters, orders, couriers, to hasten the
tardy reinforcements of North Carolina and New York, and push on the raw
soldiers of the Old Dominion, who now numbered three hundred men. They
were called the Virginia regiment; and Joshua Fry, an English gentleman,
bred at Oxford, was made their colonel, with Washington as next in
command. Fry was at Alexandria with half the so-called regiment, trying
to get it into marching order; Washington, with the other half, had
pushed forward to the Ohio Company's storehouse at Wills Creek, which
was to form a base of operations. His men were poor whites, brave, but
hard to discipline; without tents, ill armed, and ragged as Falstaff's
recruits. Besides these, a band of backwoodsmen under Captain Trent had
crossed the mountains in February to build a fort at the forks of the
Ohio, where Pittsburg now stands,--a spot which Washington had examined
when on his way to Fort Le Boeuf, and which he had reported as the best
for the purpose. The hope was that Trent would fortify himself before
the arrival of the French, and that Washington and Fry would join him in
time to secure the position. Trent had begun the fort; but for some
unexplained reason had gone back to Wills Creek leaving Ensign Ward with
forty men at work upon it. Their labors were suddenly interrupted. On
the seventeenth of April a swarm of bateaux and canoes came down the
Alleghany, bringing, according to Ward, more than a thousand Frenchmen,
though in reality not much above five hundred, who landed, planted
cannon against the incipient stockade, and summoned the ensign to
surrender, on pain of what might ensue.[145] He complied, and was
allowed to depart with his men. Retracing his steps over the mountains,
he reported his mishap to Washington; while the French demolished his
unfinished fort, began a much larger and better one, and named it Fort
Duquesne.

[Footnote 145: See the summons in _Precis des Faits_, 101.]

They had acted