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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 and dearly fought battle-field! Aye--but he had been
to school with Gates and Mercer and Gladwin, Lewis and Boone, and
Stephen, on Braddock's twelve-foot swath of a road in the Alleghanies!

It was more than a century ago that George Washington died at Mount
Vernon. "I die hard," he said, "but I am not afraid to go." Motley's
true words of the death of William the Silent may be aptly quoted of
Washington: "As long as he lived, he was the guiding-star of a whole
brave nation, and when he died, the little children wept on the
streets."

If, as Professor McMaster has boldly said, "George Washington is an
unknown man," it is not, as might be inferred, because the man himself
was an enigma to his own generation, or that which immediately succeeded
him; it is because the General and the President have been remembered by
us, and the man, forgotten. If this is true, it is because our school
histories, the principal source from which the mass of the people
receive their information, are portraying only one of the fractions
which made the great man what he was. It is said: "He was as fortunate
as great and good." Do our school histories inform the youth of the land
why he was "fortunate" to the exclusion of why he was "great and good?"
If so, George Washington is, or soon will be, "an unknown man."

One hundred years ago he was not unknown as a man. "Washington is
dead," exclaimed Napoleon in the orders of the day, when he learned the
sad news; "this great man fought against tyranny; he consolidated the
liberty of his country. His memory will ever be dear to the French
people, as to all freemen in both hemispheres." Said Charles James Fox,
"A character of virtues, so happily tempered by one another and so
wholly unalloyed by any vices, is hardly to be found on the pages of
history." And these men spoke of whom--the General, the President, or
the man? If, as legend states, "the Arab of the desert talks of
Washington in his tent, and his name is familiar to the wandering
Scythian," what of other "fortunate" heroes, of William of Orange,
Gustavus Adolphus, and Cromwell, who, like Washington, consolidated the
liberties of their countries, and with an eclat far more likely to win
the admiration of an oriental?

Half a century ago, the attention of multitudes was directed to the man
Washington in the superb oratory of Edward Everett. Quoting that
memorable extract from the letter of the youthful surveyor, who boasted
of earning an honest dubloon a day, the speaker set before his
audiences "not an ideal hero, wrapped in cloudy generalities and a mist
of vague panegyric, but the real, identical man." And, again, he quoted
Washington's letter written to Governor Dinwiddie after Braddock's
defeat, that his hearers might "see it all--see the whole man." Was
Edward Everett mistaken, are these letters not extant today, or are they
unread? Surely, the last supposition must be the true one, if the man
Washington is being forgotten.

And look back to the school histories of Edward Everett's time. The
"reader" and "history" were one text-book in that day, and one of the
best known, "Porter's Rhetorical Reader," lies before me, prefaced May,
1831. From it notice two quotations which must have influenced youthful
ideas of Washington. One is the last verse of Pierpont's "Washington:"

  "God of our sires and sons,
  Let other Washingtons
        Our country bless,
  And, like the brave and wise
  Of by-gone centuries,
  Show that true greatness lies
        In righteousness."

The other, from the address "America," of the Irish orator Phillips;
having exalted Washington as general, statesman, and conqueror, he
continues:

"If he had paused there, history might have doubted what station to
assign him; whether at the head of her citizens, or her soldiers, her
heroes, or her patriots. But the last glorious act crowns his career,
and banishes the hesitation. Who, like Washington, after having
emancipated a hemisphere, resigned its crown, and preferred the
retirement of domestic life to the adoration of a land he might be
almost said to have created? Happy, proud America! The lightnings of
heaven yielded to your philosophy! The temptations of earth could not
seduce your patriotism!"

A candid review of the more popular school histories will bring out the
fact that the man Washington is almost forgotten, in so far as the
general and the statesman do not portray him. In one, "Young Folks'
History of the United States" (to name the production of an author whom
criticism cannot injure), there seems to be but one line, of five words,
which describes the character of Washington. Could we not forego, for
once, what the Indian chieftain said of the "charmed life" Washington
bore at Braddock's defeat, to make room for one little reason why
Washington was "completer in nature" and of "a nobler human type" than
any and all of the heroes of romance?

Mr. Otis Kendall Stuart has written a most interesting account of "The
Popular Opinion of Washington" as ascertained by inquiry among persons
of all ages, occupations, and conditions. He found that Washington was
held to be a "broad," "brave," "thinking," "practical," man; an
aristocrat, so far as the dignity of his position demanded, but willing
to "work with his hands," and with a credit that was "A1!" And "when he
did a thing, he did it;" and, if to the question, "Was he a great
general and statesman?" there was some hesitation, to the question, "Was
he a great man?" the answer was an unhesitating "Yes."

One may hold that such opinions as these have been gained from our
school histories, but I think they are not so much from the histories,
as from the popular legends of Washington, which, true and false, will
never be forgotten by the common people until they cease to represent
the _man_--not the patient, brave, and wary general, or the calm,
far-seeing statesman, but that "simple, stainless, and robust
character," as President Eliot has so aptly described it, "which served
with dazzling success the precious cause of human progress through
liberty, and so stands, like the sunlit peak of Matterhorn, unmatched in
all the world."

The real essence of that "simple, stainless, and robust character" is
nowhere so clearly seen as on these Alleghany trails. In the West with
Washington we may still "see it all--see the whole man."

To us of the Central West, the memory of Washington and his dearest
ambitions must be precious beyond that of any other American, whether
statesman, general, or seer. Under strange providential guidance the
mind and heart of that first American was turned toward the territories
lying between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, and it is to be
doubted if any other portion of his country received so much of his
attention and study as this. Washington was the original
expansionist--not for expansion's sake, truly, but for country's sake
and duty's. If Washington was the father of his country, he was in a
stronger and more genuine sense the father of the West. It was begotten
of him. Others might have led the Revolutionary armies through the
valleys as deep and dark as those through which Washington passed, and
have eventually fought England to a similar standstill as did
Washington; at least