ning the
loyalty of her Indian allies. There were settlements in the southern
up-country as far west as Fort Moore on the Savannah, as far as Camden
and Charlottesburg, and beyond Hillsborough. The outpost of Virginia was
at Wills Creek, within striking distance of the Ohio; the valleys of the
Blue Ridge were filling with Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch; while
German and Dutch farmers of New York occupied both sides of the Mohawk
nearly to its source. Oswego, long since established on Lake Ontario,
was abundantly justifying the ambitious scheme inaugurated sixty years
earlier by Governor Dongan; for official corruption at Montreal had not
made French goods cheaper since the days of Frontenac, and the northern
Indians yearly resorted to Oswego to trade with the English. And every
year unlicensed traders, such as Christopher Gist and William Trent, not
to mention many "more abandoned wretches," hired men on the Pennsylvania
or Virginia frontier and with goods on pack-horses crossed the
Alleghanies to traffic among the western Indians. In 1749, Celoron de
Bienville, sent by the Governor of Canada to take possession of the Ohio
Valley, found English traders at Logstown and Scioto, and in nearly
every village as far west as the Miami. This was the very year that John
Hanbury, a London merchant, and some Virginia gentlemen, among whom were
Lawrence and Augustine Washington, petitioned the Board of Trade for a
grant of five hundred thousand acres of land on the upper Ohio. And the
petition was granted, in order that the country might be more rapidly
settled, and "to cultivate the friendship and carry on a more extensive
commerce with the native Indians, and as a step towards checking the
encroachments of the French."

Those who went into the back country received little assistance from
Government, either English or colonial, in extending the frontier, and
but little in defending it. Tide-water rice or tobacco planters,
peaceful and gain-loving Quakers at Philadelphia, New York or Boston
merchants trading in the West Indies, all untouched by Indian massacre
and absorbed in local politics, begrudged money spent to protect a
half-alien people, often without their jurisdiction. The English
Government, for its part, had long observed the comfortable maxim that
if her navy policed the sea, the colonists were bound to provide their
own defense in time of peace. Money for Indian presents was regularly
sent; garrisons maintained in