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
Vol. XVIII-25 385
386 Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.
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
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
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
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
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.