Now eager to return to Williamsburg and sound the alarm about nefarious French designs, he set off toward a place called Murthering Town. By this point, his horses were so enfeebled that he decided to abandon them and hike with backpacks. Adapting to the woods, he stripped off his Tidewater costume and assumed “an Indian walking dress” of leather leggings and possibly even moccasins.³⁰ This return trip tested his wilderness skills. At first, he and Gist steered their canoe downstream in an icy, churning current that nearly dashed them against jagged rocks. At the first resting place, they found that their Indian guides, dining on roasted bears, wouldn’t budge until they had consumed this feast.

With the cold weather having grown “scarcely supportable,” Washington and Gist soldiered on alone to Murthering Town, where they picked up a “party of French Indians” who pledged to guide them on foot along the fastest route to the Forks of the Ohio.³¹ The group trudged on for miles, with Washington so exhausted that he allowed one Indian guide to carry his backpack. Washington trusted this Indian, but Gist intuited something amiss as the woods suddenly grew unfamiliar. At one point, when they came to a meadow, the Indian hustled out into the clearing without warning, spun around, and fired at them point-blank from fifteen paces. Washington, unscathed, saw Gist race to disarm the Indian. “Are you shot?” the young man hollered, and Gist shouted back, “No.” Gist jumped on the Indian, pinned him to the ground, and was about to execute him with his musket when Washington pleaded for his life. They kept the Indian bound and released him after dark. As he scuttled off into the woods, Washington and Gist, fearing he might return with others, dashed in the opposite direction. “As you will not have him killed,” Gist upbraided Washington, “we must get him away and then we must travel all night”—which is exactly what they did.³²

When these weary travelers arrived at an icy river, they expected to find it frozen solid. Instead, a large section of icy water swirled in the middle of the river. With “one poor hatchet,” Washington remembered, he and Gist devoted an entire day to hacking out a rude raft to float them across.³³ Midway across the river, it became wedged in an ice floe, stuck so fast that Washington “expected every moment our raft would sink and we perish.”³⁴ He tried to free the craft by pushing a pole against the river bottom: “I put out my setting pole to try to stop the raft that the ice might pass by, when the rapidity of the stream threw it with so much violence against the pole that it jerked me into ten feet [of ] water.”³⁵ Bobbing breathlessly in the current, Washington latched onto one log of the raft and heaved himself onto its surface. Unable to get ashore, he and Gist lay stranded on an island in the river. Although Washington had been submerged in the icy water, it was Gist who suffered frostbite in his toes and fingers. The pair withstood the elements on the island all night. By the next morning, the river having congealed into a sheet of ice, they were able to scramble across to safety. Clearly, to have survived these mishaps, Washington must have been a physical prodigy, made of seemingly indestructible stuff. In his first political assignment, he had overcome a punishing array of obstacles, both physical and psychological, without losing sight of his primary objectives.

After stopping briefly at Belvoir to regale the Fairfax family with tales of his wilderness saga, Washington beat a path to Williamsburg and on January 16, 1754, handed to Governor Dinwiddie the sealed letter from the French commandant, who refused to capitulate before British threats. Washington also supplied the governor with a map of Fort Le Boeuf and careful estimates of French military power. Impressed by the thoroughness with which Washington had tackled this complex task, Dinwiddie asked him to take the nearly seven thousand words of his frontier journal and convert them overnight into a coherent report for the council.

In presenting this narrative to the governor, Washington struck a note of servility: “I hope it will be sufficient to satisfy Your Honour with my proceedings, for that was my aim in undertaking the journey and chief study throughout the prosecution of it.”³⁶ Washington had no time to buff his prose and prefaced his journal with a disclaimer: “There intervened but one day between my arrival in Williamsburg and the time for the Council’s meeting for me to prepare and transcribe, from the rough minutes I had taken in my travels, this journal.” Such a timetable “admitted of no leisure to consult of a new and proper form to offer it in or to correct or amend the diction of the old.”³⁷ It was an early example of Washington being nagged by his sense of an inadequate education.

Published in colonial newspapers as far afield as Massachusetts, this report had repercussions beyond anything Washington could have envisioned. In late January, Dinwiddie alerted the Board of Trade in London to the prospect of a major French encroachment in the spring: the French would marshal fifteen hundred French soldiers and countless Indian warriors and commence a program to build more forts in the Ohio Country. To substantiate his case, Dinwiddie sent along Washington’s report, which was published in London in pamphlet form as The Journal of Major George Washington, giving the obscure young man instant renown in the British Empire. The slim volume helped kindle a spark that eventually led to the conflagration of the French and Indian War. Washington had expected money as well as fame for his trouble and was not assuaged when the assembly voted him a measly fifty-pound reward. As he grumbled to his brother Augustine, “I was employed to go a journey in the winter . . . and what did I get by it? My expenses borne!”³⁸ It was Washington’s first bitter lesson in politics.

Washington parlayed the governor’s approval of his work into a central role in the colony’s upcoming military campaign in the Ohio Country. Within a week of arriving in Williamsburg, he was authorized, as adjutant of the Northern Neck District, to raise and train one hundred militia. Joined by another hundred troops, they were to march to the Forks of the Ohio and construct a fort. On January 28 Washington contacted another Virginia official, Richard Corbin, and lobbied him for a promotion. Once again his style was both assertive and self-effacing: he tugged the forelock and pushed himself forward at once, as if he knew he was being boorish but couldn’t contain himself. He started out by conceding that the “command of the whole forces” of Virginia would be “a charge too great for my youth and inexperience.” Then he continued: “But if I could entertain hopes that you thought me worthy of the post of lieutenant colonel and would favour me so far as to mention it at the appointment of officers, I could not but entertain a true sense of the kindness.” This dogged young man cited “my own application and diligent study of my duty,” rather than his ability, as the best reason for his promotion.³⁹ As it turned out, Washington did not overstate his worth, and Dinwiddie presented him with a commission as a lieutenant colonel. Almost twenty-two, Washington was emerging as a wunderkind to be reckoned with in the world of Virginia politics.

CHAPTER FOUR

Bloodbath

FROM HIS HEADQUARTERS IN ALEXANDRIA, Lieutenant Colonel George Washington attempted to inject discipline into a group of raw recruits he had enlisted for the impending march. Scarcely the spit-and-polish outfit of his dreams, they were marginal figures who inhabited the fringes of colonial society, and his attitude toward these rank amateurs mingled sympathy with vague distaste. As he bemoaned to Dinwiddie, most of these soldiers were “loose, idle persons that are quite destitute of house and home and I may truly say many of them of clothes.”¹ Throughout his career, Washington complained of his charges being too rambunctious; they never seemed mannerly enough for his tastes. These scruffy, underfunded troops lacked shoes, stockings, shirts, and coats, as well as cutlasses, halberds, pikes, and drums. Their tattered clothing was especially upsetting for Washington, who lobbied Dinwiddie for red uniforms, advancing the novel sartorial theory that among the Indians red “is compared to blood and is looked upon as the distinguishing marks of warriors and great men.”² He went so far as to opine that the Indians ridiculed the French soldiers’ shabby appearance, “and I really believe [that] is the chief motive why they hate and despise them as they do.”³