e, having on several occasions been severely punished
by the French, they were less rancorous in their opposition to New
France. For this reason, just as the English were getting ready to
make good their claim to the Ohio by actual colonization, the Iroquois
began to let in the French at the back door. In 1749, Galissoniere,
then governor of New France, dispatched to the great valley a party
of soldiers under Celoron de Bienville, with directions to conduct a
thorough exploration, to bury at the mouths of principal streams lead
plates graven with the French claim,--a custom of those days,--and to
drive out English traders, Celoron proceeded over the Lake Chautauqua
route, from Lake Erie to the Alleghany River, and thence down the
Ohio to the Miami, returning to Lake Erie over the old Maumee portage.
English traders, who could not be driven out, were found swarming into
the country, and his report was discouraging. The French realized
that they could not maintain connection between New Orleans and their
settlements on the St. Lawrence, if driven from the Ohio valley. The
governor sent home a plea for the shipment of ten thousand French
peasants to settle the region; but the government at Paris was just
then as indifferent to New France as was King George to his colonies,
and the settlers were not sent.

Meanwhile, the English were not idle. The first settlement they made
west of the mountains, was on New River, a branch of the Kanawha
(1748); in the same season, several adventurous Virginians hunted and
made land-claims in Kentucky and Tennessee. Before the close of the
following year (1749), there had been formed, for fur-trading and
colonizing purposes, the Ohio Company, composed of wealthy Virginians,
among whom were two brothers of Washington. King George granted the
company five hundred thousand acres, south of and along the Ohio
River, on which they were to plant a hundred families and build
and maintain a fort. As a base of supplies, they built a fortified
trading-house at Will's Creek (now Cumberland, Md.), near the head of
the Potomac, and developed a trail ("Nemacolin's Path"), sixty miles
long, across the Laurel Hills to the mouth of Redstone Creek, on the
Monongahela, where was built another stockade (1752).

Christopher Gist, a famous backwoodsman, was sent (1750), the year
after Celoron's expedition, to explore the country as far down as
the falls of the Ohio, and select lands for the new company. Gist's