s only twenty-one years old, the Governor of Virginia
picked him out for a more delicate and dangerous piece of work.

The English colonies lay along the Atlantic coast, while the French held
Canada. The country west of the Alleghany Mountains, which we now know
as Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, etc., was claimed by both the French and the
English, though only the Indians lived there. The French made friends of
the savages, and began building forts at different points in that
region, and putting soldiers there to keep the English away. The
Governor of Virginia wanted to put a stop to this, and so he resolved to
send a messenger into "the Great Woods," as the western country was
called, to warn the French off, and to win the friendship of the Indians
if possible.

For such a service he needed a man with a cool head, good sense, great
courage, and, above all, what boys call "grit;" for whoever should go
would have to make his way for many hundreds of miles through a
trackless wilderness, over mountains and rivers, and among hostile
Indians. Young Washington had already shown what stuff he was made of,
and, young as he was, he was regarded as a remarkable man. The governor
therefore picked him out as the very best person for the work that was
to be done.

It was November when Washington set out, and the weather was very cold
and wet. He took four white men and two Indians with him, the white men
being hunters who knew how to live in the woods. As the country they had
to pass through was a wilderness, they had to carry all their supplies
with them on pack-horses. They rode all day through the woods, and when
night came slept in little tents by some spring or watercourse. Day
after day they marched forward, until at last they reached an Indian
village, near the spot where Pittsburgh now stands, and there they
halted to make friends with the Indians.

This was not very easy, as the French had already had a good deal to do
with the tribes in that region; but Washington persuaded the chief,
whose name was Tanacharisson, to go with him to visit the French
commander, who was stationed in a fort hundreds of miles away, near Lake
Erie.

This march, like the other, was slow and full of hardships; but at last
the fort was reached, and Washington delivered his message to the French
officer. A day or two later the Frenchman gave him his answer, which was
that the western country belonged to the French, and that they had no
notion of gi