History first noticed George Washington in 1753, as a daring and
resourceful twenty-one-year-old messenger sent on a dangerous
mission into the American wilderness. He carried a letter from
the governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, addressed to the
commander of French troops in that vast region west of the Blue
Ridge Mountains and south of the Great Lakes that Virginians
called the Ohio Country. He was ordered to lead a small party
over the Blue Ridge, then across the Allegheny Mountains, there
to rendezvous with an influential Indian chief called the Half-
King. He was then to proceed to the French outpost at Presque
Isle (present-day Erie, Pennsylvania), where he would deliver
his message “in the Name of His Britanic Majesty.” The key
passage in the letter he was carrying, so it turned out,
represented the opening verbal shot in what American colonists
would call the French and Indian War: “The Lands upon the river
Ohio, in the Western Parts of the Colony of Virginia, are so
notoriously known to be the Pro