Ohio History Journal

EDITORIALANA.

 

VOL. XVIII. No. 3.                                 JULY, 1909.

 

WASHINGTON'S FIRST BATTLE GROUND.

 

For many years it had been the ardent desire of the Editor to trav-

erse the country of the Monongahela and the Youghiogheny, where the

youthful Washington began his diplomatic career, entered his military

life, received his baptism of fire, won his spurs in battle, met his first

defeat and succumbed to his only surrender; experiences that taught him

his preparatory lessons in the science of statesmanship and the art of

warfare. A few days snatched from the busy mid-summer just passing,

gave the Editor his longed-for opportunity.

It is but a two hours' whirl on the railway from Pittsburg, the old-

time Fort Duquesne, up the course of the Youghiogheny to Connelsville,

the route, if one so chooses, carrying the traveler through West Newton,

the location selected by the original Ohio Company for the building and

launching of the galley "Adventure," the Ohio Mayflower. From Con-

nelsville the traveler speeds on southwestward to Uniontown, passing

the while, a station called "Gist's," the site of the one-time home of the

famous Indian trader, guide, pioneer diplomat, Ohio Company's agent,

Christopher Gist, often the companion and always the friend of Wash-

ington. In this commonplace journey one realizes that one is in the

land of historic memories, but the country, now thickly crowded with

busy villages and noisy towns, all united and interwoven by a net-work

of steel threads for steam and electric railways, does not remind one

of the descriptions of the Indian inhabited river banks and mountain

sides, thicket fringed and forest covered. At Uniontown, however, one

does to some extent, bid farewell to the disillusion wrought by modern

civilization. The Editor and his companion, in comfortable carriage,

were driven at once into the wildness and beauty of the valleys and hills

of the Laurel range, which finds its southwestern termination in Fayette

county. The route followed was the National highway, the modern, im-

proved, edition de luxe, of the old Washington road, extending from

Will's Creek (Cumberland, Md.) to Brownsville, present site of the

ancient Redstone store house of the Ohio Company on the Monongahela.

Washington's road, now mostly in its course paralleled by the Na-

tional Road, was originally, in this section, the path hewn through

the forest and thicket by the Delaware Indian, Nemacolin. It was over

this route that Washington passed with Gist and servitors in the winter

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of 1753 on his errand for Governor Dinwiddie to the Ohio Forks and

Logstown and thence up the Allegheny to Venango and Le Boeuf, where

he met the French embassy, the negotiations however amounting to

naught. It was this same route that the young Virginian soldier passed

over, in the spring of 1754, from Will's Creek, to pre-empt the occupa-

tion of the Ohio Forks by the building of a fort that was to command

the entrance of the Ohio Valley, an enterprise previously assigned to

Captain William Trent. But Trent and his fort builders were over-

powered by the French forces who suddenly swooped down upon the

Virginia soldiers, and put them to flight. Then Dinwiddie, the royal

governor of the Virginia province, appointed the boy Washington, for he

was scarcely twenty-two, commander of three military companies, and

despatched him to the Forks, over that same Nemacolin's Path. The

story of that unique and adventurous campaign has been told time and

again in standard American histories, by Sparks, Irving, Bancroft, Park-

man, Avery, and most recently by Hulbert in his "Historic Highways."

But Washington's own report and letters at the time are our surest

authority. The young and intrepid commander, then a lieutenant colonel

and adjutant general of the northern division of Virginia, with some

three hundred frontier soldiers, set out from Will's Creek, late in April

(1754). He slowly but boldly pushed along into the wilderness of the

mountainous region of southern (now) Pennsylvania, then claimed as

part of Virginia. They had to literally work their way inch by inch;

the trail had to be widened and leveled, trees had to be felled, under-

brush cut away, creeks bridged or forded: it was the tedious and difficult

advance through a primitive forest. They had proceeded some fifty

miles toward their destination, when they reached the region of the

Laurel ridge. Indian out-runners from Washington's old friend, Tanach-

arisson, the half-king of the Delawares, arrived to warn the colonial

commander to be on his guard as a party of the French were advanc-

ing from the Forks, where after the abandonment by Trent, they had

built Fort Duquesne. Such indeed was the case; the French force was

paddling its canoes up the Monongahela to the mouth of Redstone Creek.

Washington, not to be entrapped unprepared, took a position at a

place called the Great Meadows, on a branch of Great Meadows Run,

at the foot of Laurel Hill, a situation Washington described as "a

charming field for an encounter." Here he cleared the underbrush, threw

up an entrenchment. made ready to defend himself and awaited results.

Gist arrived from his home, some ten miles north, to tell Washington

that La Force in command of fifty French soldiers were only a few

miles away and rapidly approaching. The Delaware half-king with a

band of friendly Indians, hurrying to the aid of the English, sent a scout

to inform Washington that the French detachment was in his (Half-

King's) vicinity, only about six miles from the Great Meadows. Wash-

ington immediately chose a contingent of forty men, leaving the rest to

guard the camp, and set off to join the Half King. The intervening

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Editorialana.                       387

 

distance lay over one of the steep hills of the Laurel ridge. The only

path was an Indian single trail, through a dense woods, Washington's

diary states: "I set out with forty men before ten [P. M.] and it was

from that time till near sunrise before we reached the Indians' camp.

having marched in small paths through a heavy rain and a night as

dark as it is possible to conceive; we were often tumbling over one

another, and often so lost, that fifteen or twenty minutes' search could

not find the path again." This march of five miles required ten hours,

a weary, wet drag at the rate of a mile in two hours. Hulbert, who

made a minute study of the route, says: "Beside this all-night march

from Great Meadows to Washington's Spring, Wolfe's ascent to the

Plains of Abraham at Quebec was a pastime." And after viewing both

localities the Editor is ready to confirm the comparison. Our drive took

us from Great Meadows over this Laurel Hill. We ascended from the

basin of Great Meadows Run to the Summit House, a pretentious sum-

mer resort hotel that rests upon the crest of the hill. Here we left the

Washington Road, as now constructed, and literally dived into the depths

of a seemingly impenetrable forest, apparently a second growth of the

woods Washington threaded that rainy, dark night, a century and a half

ago. No wilder scene or thicker mountain fastness has it been our

fortune to enpass. It is as pathless now as it was in its pristine growth.

This is indeed the forest primeval; oaks, maples, chestnuts, poplars,

locusts, sumacs, spruce and occasionally a stray elm, elbow their

branches for room, while the ever present wild vines knit the all-too-

crowded trunks and over-reaching limbs together in one entwined tangle.

The rock-covered hillsides are too steep and sterile for cultivation and

nature is left to reveal unchecked in its vigor and beauty. It was over

this timber encumbered mountain side that the stony, jolting road brought

us to the site of Washington's Spring, now in the posession of a thrifty

woodsman farmer, almost the only one we met, whose natty house marks

the place, part way down the hill, where the Half King, Tanacharisson,

and his associate sachems, Scarooyadi and Monakatoocha, with their

band of savages, awaited the coming of Washington's forty heroes. It

was early morning, on that eventful day,

"And the woods against a stormy sky

Their giant branches tossed,"

when the two forces united and descended a mile further down the hill

to the hollow where La Force and the French held their half-concealed

position in a "low, obscure place." Washington and his colonists led the

right wing of the advancing little column; the Half King and the In-

dians comprised the left. The rattle of the English musketry suddenly

rang out from the open hollow in the forest depths and echoed along

the mountain side. They had found the foe. It was Washington's first

battle, and in a letter to his brother, relating the affair, he wrote: "The

right wing where I stood was exposed to and received all the enemy's

fire; here I heard the bullets whistle and believe me, there is something

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388        Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

charming in the sound." Here the warrior Washington was born, in

the heart of the gloomy forest on the mountain sides of the Laurel

range, between the Youghiogheny and the Monongahela rivers, not sixty

miles from the banks of the Ohio, for the valley of which beautiful

river, this same battle was fought. This skirmish was short, sharp and

decisive, lasting "only about fifteen minutes." Washington reported "We

killed ten, wounded one, and took twenty-one prisoners."  Only one

Canadian escaped. The Virginians had one man killed and three wounded.

Among the prisoners was La Force and among those killed was Coulon

de Joumonville. It was claimed by the French that Joumonville was an

embassador, under military escort, on a mission as a civil messenger,

to warn the English not to trespass on the French territory, and that

his "killing off", under the circumstances, was in violation of the usage

of nations. But after examination by the Council of Virginia and the

House of Burgesses, Washington's first victory remained untarnished as

to his honor or soldiership. The claim was only a phase of French

duplicity, La Force's expedition being in fact, as Washington puts it in

his diary, "a plausible pretense to discover our camp and obtain a

knowledge of our forces and situation."  The glen where Joumonville

met his tragic end is today, as it must have been at that time, apparently

the only breathing spot amid the wild density of the forest that extends

unbroken for miles in every direction  Washington now fell back, across

the hill, to his camp at Great Meadows, where he completed the en-

trenchments previously begun, calling the crude earth-packed palisades,

forming an irregular, triangular enclosure of about a third of an acre

in area, Fort Necessity. The name was suggested by the scarcity of

provisions and ammunition and the deprivations endured by the little

garrison. The location of this famous fortification is most picturesque.

It lies in the center of a long basin or narrow gap between two of the

Laurel hills, the little valley extending length-wise at this point stretches

nearly north and south. The entrenchments were not more than sixty

yards from the base of the western hill and perhaps two hundred and

fifty from the foot of the eastern range. The Great Meadows Run, here

a trinkling stream, so attenuated as to hardly deserve the name, cut

through a corner of the earthworks. These latter are today scarcely

distinguishable, though here and there a slight elevation or hump of

grass and weed-grown sod suggests the line that was once followed by

the earthen defenses. A row of tall stakes, erected at intervals, desig-

nates the lines where no longer discernible. To the civilian, this site

for a defense would seem to invite attack from the surrounding eleva-

tions, rather than command protection, but Washington's strategic sense

was instinctive and proverbial and we yield to his judgment. It was

near the middle of June when Washington was re-enforced by Virginia

troops till they numbered some three hundred, still further augmented

by a company of South Carolinians under Mackey, holding a commission

of captaincy in the regular British army. To the fortification also came

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Editorialana.                       389

 

the Half King and Queen Aliquippa, her son and "about twenty-five or

thirty Indian families," making in all about eighty or one hundred

persons, including men and women. A band of Shawnees from the Ohio

and many Indian traders were among the incomers. Washington, thus

situated and equipped, played the waiting game, till the morning of

July 3rd, when there appeared among the trees on the rising ground at

the base of the western hill, more than five hundred French soldiers and

some four hundred Indian allies, the latter mainly from the Ohio country,

all under command of Captain De Villiers, brother of the unfortunate

Joumonville. The French and Indians, skulking under cover of the

forest, began the firing late in the forenoon. Washington placed his

troops mostly in the trenches in front of the fort. It was a desultory

conflict in which the attacking party had greatly the advantage. The

rain fell in torrents, "nearly drowning the English soldiers" in the stock-

ade trenches where the men stood knee-deep in the water and soft mud.

At eight o'clock at night, when darkness had dropped its veil over the

scene, the French commander requested a parley. Washington consented.

The negotiations were carried on in the rain, by the light of a candle,

unsteadily flickering in the wet wind. Washington realizing the inequality

of the contest on his part, his troops and ammunition water-soaked, his

Indian allies discouraged and ineffective, the enemy far greater, indeed

more than double, in numbers, agreed to a capitulation, which granted

him permission, the next morning, to retire with all his forces and return

undisturbed to his own country, carrying with him all his arms, except

the swivels or small cannon. He was to march out with drums beating

and banners flying, thus being accorded the honors of war. So it was.

Early on the morning of July 4th-memorable date in later years-the

brave commander, defeated but not conquered, marched out of his rain-

drenched enclosure. Washington had met his first repulse, and the only

time in his career surrendered to the enemy. The losses were almost

equal, seventy killed and wounded on each side. Such was the defense

of and the defeat at Fort Necessity. The Half King, who witnessed

rather than participated in, the affair, expressed himself as perfectly

disgusted with the white man's mode of warfare, "The French," he said,

"were cowards; the English, fools," neither knew how to fight; Wash-

ington, he frankly remarked, "was a good natured man, but had no ex

perience and would by no means take advice from the Indians, but was

always driving them on to fight by his directions; that he lay at one

place from one full moon to another, and made no fortifications at all,

except that little thing upon the meadows, where he thought the French

would come up to him in open field." Such was the memorable and

unfortunate event which the young Virginian colonel then thought would

seriously disparage, if indeed it might not end, his military career.

We turned off the main road and drove down the lane, through

Fazenbaker's farm, across the little bed of the Great Meadows Run, in-

significant in appearance but large in perspective interest, to the spot

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390        Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

staked out as the fort. As we stood within the historic precincts and

began to jot down a note or two, the scene of that battle filled our

mind's eye; the French and Indians dodging behind the trees, now

mostly cleared away, then fringing the nearby hill base; the waist-high

earthen embankment, within which stood the plucky Virginians, battling

for -the possession of the Ohio country beyond the "beautiful river," a

land, though that day was lost, soon to be theirs, and later the western

empire of a new republic. Our mental picture, was made more vivid

and partially real, by the singular incident, that as we stood .there, in

our historic reverie, the massed clouds in great black battalions rushed

over the Laurel hilltops, and to the flashes of forked lightning and the

rumble of heavy thunder, heaven's artillery, burst their cerements and

swept the Great Meadows with a deluge of rain. That feature of the

dramatic day, a hundred and fifty years ago, was all too realistically

re-enacted. We did not desire to longer hold the fort but capitulated

and with less dignity and military form than the occupant of that other

stormy day, retreated to the hospitable abode of good farmer Fazenbaker,

a spacious brick mansion, an old-time inn on Washington's road. '

But we had stood within the remains of Fort Necessity; its walls,

through the pounding of the elements and the ruthless hand of man, are

wellnight worn to oblivion, but the Great Meadows plain, serene, stately

and solemn, lies in peaceful and picturesque perfection as of old, guarded

by the encircling sentinels of imperishable hills and enshrined in the halo

of Washington's immortal fame. That Fort Necessity was a hallowed spot

in the sentiment of its builder and commander, is evidenced by the fact

that in 1769 Washington acquired from Virginia, a patent, which was

afterwards confirmed by Pennsylvania, for the tract of two hundred

and thirty-four acres of the Great Meadows land, including the fort.

This he sedulously retained till his death, disposing of it in his will.

We can imagine how in the later years of his incomparable life, the first

citizen of the nation, he had made free and independent, would visit

the scene of that July day, when on the threshold of his career, with all

lost save honor, he retreated haughtily with his little garrison, "his

regimental colors borne in front and the men carrying on their backs

their wounded comrades and such of their baggage as they were able

to carry in this way."

The bones of those warriors have crumbled to dust,

The steel of their swords is naught but rust,

And their souls are with the saints -we trust.

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