n of the rights of their colonial sea-to-sea
charters, the English threw off the lethargy with which they had
failed to protect their traders, and in grants to the Ohio and
Loyal land companies began resolutely to form plans looking to
the occupation of the interior. But the French seized the English
trading-house at Venango which they converted into a fort; and
Virginia's protest, conveyed by a calm and judicious young man, a
surveyor, George Washington, availed not to prevent the French
from seizing Captain Trent's hastily erected military post at the
forks of the Ohio and constructing there a formidable work, named
Fort Duquesne. Washington, with his expeditionary force sent to
garrison Captain Trent's fort, defeated Jumonville and his small
force near Great Meadows (May, 1754); but soon after he was
forced to surrender Fort Necessity to Coulon de Villiers.

The titanic struggle, fittingly precipitated in the backwoods of
the Old Southwest, was now on--a struggle in which the resolute
pioneers of these backwoods first seriously measured their
strength with the French and their copper-hued allies, and
learned to surpass the latter in their own mode of warfare. The
portentous conflict, destined to assure the eastern half of the
continent to Great Britain, is a grim, prophetic harbinger of the
mighty movement of the next quarter of a century into the
twilight zone of the trans-Alleghany territory:

CHAPTER IV. The Indian War

All met in companies with their wives and children, and set about
building little fortifications, to defend themselves from such
barbarian and inhuman enemies, whom they concluded would be let
loose upon them at pleasure.--The Reverend Hugh McAden--Diary,
July, 1755.

Long before the actual outbreak of hostilities powerful forces
were gradually converging to produce a clash between the
aggressive colonials and the crafty Indians. As the settlers
pressed farther westward into the domain of the red men,
arrogantly grazing their stock over the cherished hunting-grounds
of the Cherokees, the savages, who were already well disposed
toward the French, began to manifest a deep indignation against
the British colonists because of this callous encroachment upon
their territory. During the sporadic forays by scattered bands of
Northern Indians upon the Catawbas and other tribes friendly to
the pioneers the isolated settlements at the back part of the
Carolinas suffered rude and sanguinary onslau