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HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA

VOLUME 3




  [Illustration: MODERN ROAD ON LAUREL HILL

  [_Follows track of Washington's Road; near by, on the right,
  Washington found Jumonville's "embassy" hidden in the Ravine_]]




  HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA
  VOLUME 3

  Washington's Road (NEMACOLIN'S PATH)
  The First Chapter of the Old French War

  BY
  ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT

  _With Maps and Illustrations_

  [Illustration]

  THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY
  CLEVELAND, OHIO
  1903




  COPYRIGHT, 1903
  BY
  THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




CONTENTS


                                                    PAGE
  PREFACE                                             11
    I. WASHINGTON AND THE WEST                        15
   II. THE HUNTING-GROUND OF THE IROQUOIS             40
  III. THE ARMS OF THE KING OF FRANCE                 63
   IV. THE VIRGINIAN GOVERNOR'S ENVOY                 85
    V. THE VIRGINIA REGIMENT                         120
   VI. THE CHAIN OF FEDERAL UNION                    189




ILLUSTRATIONS


    I. MODERN ROAD ON LAUREL HILL, (Follows Track
        of Washington's Road)                         _Frontispiece_

   II. WASHINGTON'S ROAD                                          93

  III. A MAP OF THE COUNTRY BETWEEN WILLS CREEK AND
        LAKE ERIE (showing designs of the French
        for erecting forts southward of the lakes;
        from the original in the British Museum)                 109

   IV. LEDGE FROM WHICH WASHINGTON OPENED FIRE UPON
        JUMONVILLE'S PARTY                                       145

    V. SITE OF FORT NECESSITY                                    157

   VI. TWO PLANS OF FORT NECESSITY
        (_A_, Plan of Lewis's survey; _B_, Sparks's plan)        175

  VII. DIAGRAMS OF FORT NECESSITY                                179




PREFACE


The following pages are largely devoted to Washington and his times as
seen from the standpoint of the road he opened across the Alleghanies in
1754. Portions of this volume have appeared in the _Interior_, the _Ohio
State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly_, and in a monograph,
_Colonel Washington_, issued by Western Reserve University. The author's
debt to Mr. Robert McCracken, Mr. Louis Fazenbaker, and Mr. James
Hadden, all of Pennsylvania, is gratefully acknowledged.

                                                              A. B. H.

MARIETTA, OHIO, November 17, 1902.




Washington's Road

(NEMACOLIN'S PATH)


The First Chapter of the Old French War




CHAPTER I

WASHINGTON AND THE WEST


If you journey today from Cumberland, Maryland, on the Potomac, across
the Alleghanies to Pittsburg on the Ohio, you will follow the most
historic highway of America, through scenes as memorable as any on our
continent.

You may make this journey on any of the three thoroughfares: by the
Cumberland Road, with all its memorials of the gay coaching days "when
life was interwoven with white and purple," by Braddock's Road, which
was used until the Cumberland Road was opened in 1818, or by
Washington's Road, built over the famous Indian trail known during the
first half of the eighteenth century as Nemacolin's Path. In certain
parts all three courses are identical, the two latter being generally
so; and between these three "streams of human history" you may read the
record of the two old centuries now passed away.

Come and walk for a distance on the old Indian trail. We leave the
turnpike, where it swings around the mountain, and mount the ascending
ridge. The course is hard, but the path is plain before us. Small trees
are growing in the center of it, but no large ones. The track, worn a
foot into the ground by the hoofs of Indian ponies laden with peltry,
remains, still, an open aisle along the mountain crest. Now, we are
looking down--from the Indian's point of vantage. Perhaps the red man
rarely looked up, save to the sun and stars or the storm cloud, for he
lived on the heights and his paths were not only highways, they were the
highestways. As you move on, if your mind is keen toward the long ago,
the cleared hillsides become wooded again, you see the darkling valley
and hear its rivulet; far beyond, the next mountain range appears as it
did to other eyes in other days--and soon you are looking through the
eyes of the heroes of these valleys, Washington, or his comrades Stephen
or Lewis, Gladwin, hero of Detroit, or Gates, conqueror at Saratoga, or
Mercer, who was to give his life to his country at Princeton. You are
moving, now, with the thin line of scarlet uniformed Virginians; you are
standing in the hastily constructed earthen fort; if it rains, you look
up to the dim outlines of the wooded hills as the tireless young
Washington did when his ignorant interpreter betrayed him to the
intriguing French commander; you march with Braddock's thin red line to
that charnel ground beyond the bloody ford--you stand at Braddock's
grave while the army wagons hurry over it to obliterate its sight from
savage eyes.

Explain it as you will, our study of these historic routes and the
memorials which are left of them becomes, soon, a study of its hero,
that young Virginian lieutenant-colonel. Even the battles fought here
seem to have been of little real consequence, for New France fell, never
to rise, with the capture of Quebec. But it is not of little consequence
that here a brave training school was to be had for the future heroes of
the Revolution. For in what did Washington, for instance, need a
training more than in the art of maneuvering a handful of ill-equipped,
discouraged men out of the hands of a superior army? What lesson did
that youth need more than the lesson that Right becomes Might in God's
own good time? And here in these Alleghany glades we catch the most
precious pictures of the lithe, keen-eyed, sober lad, who, taking his
lessons of truth and uprightness from his widowed mother's knee, his
strength hardened by the power of the mountain rivers, his heart, now
thrilled by the songs of the mountain birds, now tempered by a St.
Pierre's hauteur, a Braddock's rebuke, or the testy suspicions of a
provincial governor, became the hero of Valley Forge and Yorktown, the
immeasurable superior of St. Pierre, Dinwiddie, Forbes, Kaunitz, or
Newcastle.

For consider the record of the Washington of 1775, beneath the Cambridge
elm. Twenty-one years before, he had capitulated, with the first army he
ever commanded, after the first day's battle he ever fought. He marched
with Braddock's ill-starred army, in which he had no official position
whatever, until defeat and rout threw on his shoulders a large share of
the responsibility of saving the army from complete annihilation. For
the past sixteen years he had led a quiet life on his farms. Why, now,
in 1775, should he have had the unstinted confidence of all men in the
hour of his country's great crisis? Why should his march from Mount
Vernon to Cambridge have been a triumphal march? Professor McMaster
asserts that the General and the President are known to us, "but George
Washington is an unknown man." How untrue this was, at least, in 1775!
How the nation believed it knew the man! How much reputation he had
gained, while those by his side lost all of theirs! What a hero--of many
defeats! What a man to fight England to a standstill after many a wary,
difficult retreat