THROUGH HIS APPOINTMENT as district adjutant in February 1753, Washington was soon enmeshed in epochal events, as the British and French empires began to clash over their colonial possessions. In 1753 Britain’s North American colonies, mostly clustered along the eastern seaboard, inhabited a corridor flanked by the Atlantic Ocean and the Allegheny Mountains. French colonial holdings followed a sweeping arc from New Orleans to the southwest, up through the Mississippi River, into the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. When both major powers claimed control of the huge Ohio Country—covering present-day Ohio and Indiana, along with parts of western Pennsylvania and West Virginia—their imperial ambitions suddenly collided in ominous fashion.

On the British side, the impetus for this looming confrontation came from the huge royal grant to the Ohio Company. To encourage settlers and protect them from French encroachment, Lawrence Washington and his colleagues advocated establishing a fort and trading post at the Forks of the Ohio (the site of present-day Pittsburgh), which would act as the flash point of imperial conflict for many years. In 1752 the Marquis de Duquesne, governor general of French Canada, countered the British move by announcing plans to construct several forts between Lake Erie and the Ohio River system, buttressing French claims in a smooth crescent from Canada to the Mississippi. This aggressive move guaranteed a violent clash with British forces.

Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie, a portly, bewigged Scot, was a prime investor in the Ohio Company. Born in Glasgow and a former customs official in Bermuda, he had a beefy, well-fed face with a drooping chin, which one wag aptly described as the “face of a longtime tax collector.”⁷ He wanted to secure the Ohio Company’s interests as well as the lucrative fur trade with the Indians, so he lobbied London for permission to erect forts in the Ohio Country. In August 1753 his superiors returned a dispatch that forever altered the life of George Washington. Dinwiddie was empowered to create a chain of forts in the disputed area and to send an envoy to the French to deliver a solemn ultimatum that they should vacate this territory claimed by England. It was a sure recipe for military conflict.

Washington likely learned of this directive from Colonel William Fairfax and in late October galloped off to Williamsburg to proffer his services as the special envoy. His prompt resolve demonstrated his courage and confidence and suggested no ordinary craving for success. Incredibly enough, on October 31, 1753, Dinwiddie and his council entrusted the twenty-one-year-old with this perilous mission. Three decades later Washington reflected on the extraordinary circumstance “that so young and inexperienced a person should have been employed on a negotiation with which subjects of the greatest importance were involved.”⁸ The instructions that Dinwiddie had received from London—and that Washington presumably stashed in his saddlebag—stated categorically that if the French were found to be building forts on English soil, they should be peacefully asked to depart. If they failed to comply, however, “we do hereby strictly charge and command you to drive them off by force of arms.”⁹ This order was signed by none other than King George II.

How could young George Washington have snared this prestigious commission? At the time, few Virginians were seasoned in frontier warfare, creating a simple lack of competitors. Washington confirmed that he was picked to go “when I believe few or none would have undertaken it.”¹⁰ Some practical reasons made Washington an excellent choice. He knew the western country from surveying; had the robust constitution to survive the winter woods; was mostly unflappable; had a mature appearance and sound judgment; and was a model youth, with no tincture of rowdiness in his nature. In certain ways, he was a very old young man. In London’s Gentleman’s Magazine, an approving author explained Washington’s selection by stating that he was “a youth of great sobriety, diligence, and fidelity.”¹¹ His friendship with leading personalities of the Ohio Company likely clinched the appointment. Four years later he admitted that there had been pervasive suspicions in other colonies that he represented only the interests of the company.

Such was the urgency of Washington’s mission that he set out for the western country the same day he pocketed the assignment. He stopped in Fredericksburg to enlist the services of Jacob Van Braam, a Dutchman by birth and a fellow Mason who would serve as his French interpreter. A proficient swordsman, Van Braam had taught Washington how to fence. Two weeks later, at Wills Creek on the Potomac River in western Maryland, he also signed up Christopher Gist, a skilled guide and surveyor of the backcountry, who knew “more of Indians and of the nature of the country than any man here,” as Washington was informed.¹² He also recruited four other men from the backwoods, including two Indian traders.

Even for someone with Washington’s formidable stamina, this trip made incomparably daunting demands. Washington recalled how, “at a most inclement season,” he had traveled 250 miles “thro[ugh] an uninhabited wilderness country” to “within 15 miles of Lake Erie in the depth of winter, when the whole face of the earth was covered with snow and the waters covered with ice.”¹³ It proved “as fatiguing a journey as it is possible to conceive, rendered so by excessive bad weather.”¹⁴ Starting in mid-November, he and his party spent a week crossing the Allegheny Mountains, slogging along a tortuous wilderness trail that twisted through impenetrable forest, forcing them to wade across streams and scale high ridges. They traveled through “excessive rains and [a] vast quantity of snow” that drenched them at every turn.¹⁵ After a wretched week, they found warmth and comfort in the rough cabin of an Indian trader named John Fraser, at the junction of the Monongahela River and Turtle Creek.

The Monongahela was so swollen by incessant rain and snow that Washington found it “quite impassable.” To lighten the heavy load on his packhorses, he had two men transport the baggage downstream by canoe, while he and others rode ahead on horseback. When they reached the Forks of the Ohio, Washington boldly showed the equestrian prowess that would later assume legendary proportions. Where others balked at crossing the frigid, fast-moving Allegheny on horseback, Washington showed no qualms. He vigorously urged his horse into the freezing current, sitting upright as it glided across the water—a magnificent image repeated many times later in his career. The more cautious group members went across by canoe.

Part of Washington’s mandate was to evaluate this spot for a fort that would form a bulwark against French expansion. He gave the site his provisional approval and commended it as “extremely well situated for a fort, as it has the absolute command of both rivers.”¹⁶ But having traversed the Allegheny, Washington also worried that it was “a very rapid swift-running water,” and he came to prefer the navigation of the Monongahela River, which would offer a calmer waterway for Virginia’s frontier settlers.¹⁷

Washington had been directed to establish contact with the leaders of local Indian tribes—the “Sachems of the Six Nations” of the Iroquois—and extract intelligence from them about French operations.¹⁸ He was also supposed to wheedle them into providing an escort to the French commander at Fort Le Boeuf, just south of Lake Erie. Winning over the Indians was no easy matter, since the Ohio Country had long been their hunting grounds and they reacted warily to European interference. On November 22 Washington made his initial contact with the Indians, meeting Chief Shingas of the Delawares, whom he invited along to a parley with other chieftains at the village of Logstown (today the town of Baden, Pennsylvania).