George Washington | Page 5

the Barbados, we infer that in spite of bashfulness he was
an easy mixer. This short journey to the Barbados marks the only
occasion on which George Washington went outside of the borders of
the American Colonies, which became later, chiefly through his genius,
the United States.[1]
[Footnote 1: J.M. Toner: The Daily Journal of Major George
Washington in 1751-2 (Albany, N.Y., 1892).]
In July, 1752, Lawrence Washington died of the disease which he had
long struggled against. He left his fortune and his property, including
Mount Vernon, to his daughter, Sarah, and he appointed his brother,
George, her guardian. She was a sweet-natured girl, but very frail, who
died before long, probably of the same disease which had carried her
father off, and, until its infectious nature was understood, used to
decimate families from generation to generation.
To have thrust upon him, at the age of twenty, the management of a
large estate might seem a heavy burden for any young man; but George
Washington was equal to the task, and it seems as if much of his career
up to that time was a direct preparation for it. He knew every foot of its
fields and meadows, of its woodlands and streams; he knew where each
crop grew, and its rotation; he had taken great interest in horses and
cattle, and in the methods for maintaining and improving their breed;
and now, of course being master, his power of choosing good men to
do the work was put to the test. But he had not been long at these new
occupations before public duties drew him away from them.
Though they knew it not, the European settlers in North America were
approaching a life-and-death catastrophe. From the days when the
English and the French first settled on the continent, Fate ordained for

them an irrepressible conflict. Should France prevail? Should England
prevail? With the growth of their colonies, both the English and the
French felt their rivalry sharpened. Although distances often very broad
kept them apart in space, yet both nations were ready to prove the
terrible truth that when two men, or two tribes, wish to fight each other,
they will find out a way. The French, at New Orleans, might be far
away from the English at Boston; and the English, in New York, or in
Philadelphia, might be removed from the French in Quebec; but in their
hatreds they were near neighbors. The French pushed westward along
the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, and from Lake Erie, they pushed
southward, across the rich plains of Ohio, to the Ohio River. Their
trails spread still farther into the Western wilderness. They set up
trading-posts in the very region which the English settlers expected to
occupy in the due process of their advance. At the junction of the
Monongahela and Ohio Rivers, they planted Fort Duquesne, which not
only commanded the approach to the territory through which the Ohio
flowed westward, but served notice on the English that the French
regarded themselves as the rightful claimants of that territory.
In 1753 Governor Dinwiddie, of Virginia, had sent a commissioner to
warn the French to cease from encroaching on the lands in the Ohio
wilderness which belonged to the King of England, but the messenger
stopped one hundred and fifty miles short of his goal. Therefore, the
Governor decided to despatch another envoy. He selected George
Washington, who was already well known for his surveying, and for
his expedition beyond the mountains, and doubtless had the backing of
the Fairfaxes and other influential gentlemen. Washington set out on
the same day he received his appointment from Governor Dinwiddie
(October 31, 1753), engaged Jacob Van Braam, a Hollander who had
taught him fencing, to be his French interpreter; and Christopher Gist,
the best guide through the Virginia wilderness, to pilot the party. In
spite of the wintry conditions which beset them, they made good time.
Washington presented his official warning to M. Joncaire, the principal
French commander in the region under dispute, but he replied that he
must wait for orders from the Governor in Quebec. One object of
Washington's mission was to win over, if possible, the Indians, whose
friendship for either the French or the English depended wholly on

self-interest. He seems to have been most successful in securing the
friendship of Thanacarishon, the great Seneca Chief, known as the
Half-King. This native left it as his opinion that
the colonel was a good-natured man, but had no experience; he took
upon him to command the Indians as his slaves, and would have them
every day upon the scout and to attack the enemy by themselves, but
would by no means take advice from the Indians. He lay in one place
from one full moon to the other,