Historic Highways of America/Volume 4/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
ROUTES OF THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH WESTWARD
IF Providence had reversed the decree which allowed Frenchmen to settle the St. Lawrence and Englishmen the middle Atlantic seaboard, and, instead, had brought Englishmen to Quebec and Frenchmen to Jamestown, it is sure that the English conquest of the American continent would not have cost the time and blood it did.
The Appalachian mountain system proved a tremendous handicap to Saxon conquest. True, there were waterways inland, the Connecticut, Hudson, Delaware, James, and Potomac rivers, but these led straight into the mountains where for generations the feeble settlements could not spread and where explorers became disheartened ere the rich empire beyond was ever reached.
The St. Lawrence, on the other hand, offered a rough but sure course tempting ambitious men onward to the great lake system from which it flowed, and the Ottawa River offered yet another course to the same splendid goal. So, while the stolid English were planting sure feet along the seaboard, New France was spreading by leaps and bounds across the longitudes. But, wide-spread as these discoveries were, they were discoveries only—the feet of those who should occupy and defend the land discovered were heavy where the light paddle of the voyageur had glistened brightly beneath the noon-day sun. It was one thing to seek out such an empire and quite another thing to occupy and fortify it. The French reached the Mississippi at the beginning of the last quarter of the seventeenth century; ten years after the middle of the eighteenth they lost all the territory between the Atlantic and Mississippi—though during the last ten years of their possession they had attempted heroically to take the nine stitches where a generation before the proverbial one stitch would have been of twenty-fold more advantage. The transportation of arms and stores upstream into the interior, around the foaming rapids and thundering falls that impeded the way, was painfully arduous labor, and the inspiration of the swift explorers, flushed with fevered dreams, was lacking to the heavy trains which toiled so far in the rear.
There were three points at which the two nations, France and England, met and struck fire in the interior of North America, and in each instance it was the French who were the aggressors—because of the easy means of access which they had into the disputed frontier region. They came up the Chaudière and down the Kennebec or up the Richelieu and Lake Champlain, striking at the heart of New England; they ascended the St. Lawrence and entered Lake Ontario, coveted and claimed by the Province of New York; they pushed through Lake Ontario and down the Allegheny to the Ohio River, which Virginia loved and sought to guard. The French tried to guard these three avenues of approach by erecting fortresses on the Richelieu River, on Lakes Champlain, Ontario, and Erie, and on the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers. These forts were the weights on the net which the French were stretching from the month of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi. And when that net was drawn taut New England and New York and Virginia would be swept into the sea!
It was a splendid scheme—but the weights were not heavy enough. After interminable blunders and delays the English broke into the net and then by desperate floundering tore it to fragments. They reached the line of forts by three routes, each difficult and hazardous, for in any case vast stretches of forests were to be passed; and until the very last, the French had strong Indian allies who guarded these forests with valor worthy of a happier cause. New England defended herself by ascending the Hudson and crossing the portage to Lake George and Lake Champlain. New York ascended the Mohawk and, crossing the famous Oneida portage to Odeida Lake, descended the Onondaga River to Oswego on Lake Ontario. Virginia spreading out, according to her unchallenged claims, across the entire continent, could only reach the French on the Ohio by ascending the Potomac to a point near the mouth of Wills Creek, whence an Indian path led northwestward over a hundred miles to the Monongahela, which was descended to its junction with the Ohio. The two former routes, to Lake Champlain and to Lake Ontario, were, with short portages, practically all-water routes, over which provisions and army stores could be transported northward to the zone into which the French had likewise come by water-routes. The critical points of both routes of both hostile nations were the strategic portages where land travel was rendered imperative by the difficulties of navigation. On these portages many forts instantly sprang into existence—in some instances mere posts and entrepôts, in some cases strongly fortified citadels.
The route from Virginia to the Ohio Valley, finally made historic by the English General Braddock, was by far the most difficult of all the ways by which the English could meet the French. The Potomac was navigable for small boats at favorable seasons for varying distances; but beyond the mountains the first water reached, the Youghiogheny, was useless for military purposes, as Washington discovered during the march of the Virginia Regiment, 1754. The route had, however, been marked out under the direction of Captain Thomas Cresap, for the Ohio Company, and was, at the time of Washington's expedition, the most accessible passageway from Virginia to the "Forks of the Ohio." The only other Virginian thoroughfare westward brought the traveller around into the valley of the Great Kanawha which empties into the Ohio two hundred odd miles below the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. It was over this slight trail by Wills Creek, Great Meadows, and the Forks of the Ohio that Washington had gone in 1753 to the French forts on French Creek; and it was this path that the same undaunted youth widened, the year after, in order to haul his swivels westward with the vanguard of Colonel Fry's army which was to drive the French from the Ohio. Washington's Road—as Nemacolin's Path should, in all conscience, be known—was widened to the _-_II.jpg)
English and French Routes to the Ohio (1756)
[From the original in the British Museum]
summit of Mount Braddock. From Mount Braddock Washington's little force retraced their steps over the road they had built in the face of the larger French army sent against them until they were driven to bay in their little fortified camp, Fort Necessity, in Great Meadows, where the capitulation took place after an all-day's battle. Marching out with the honors of war, the remnant of this first English army crawled painfully back to Wills Creek. All this took place in the summer of 1754.
The inglorious campaign ending thus in dismay was of considerably more moment than its dejected survivors could possibly have imagined. Small as were the numbers of contestants on both sides, and distant though the scene of conflict might have been, the peace between England and France was at this moment poised too delicately not to be disturbed by even the faintest roll of musketry in the distant unknown Alleghenies.
Washington had been able neither to fight successfully nor to avoid a battle by conducting a decent retreat because the reinforcements expected from Virginia were not sent him. These "reinforcements" were Rutherford's and Clarke's Independent Companies of Foot which Governor Dinwiddie had ordered from New York to Virginia but which did not arrive in Hampton Roads until the eighth of June. On the first of September these troops were marched to Wills Creek, where, being joined by Captain Demerie's Independent Company from South Carolina, they began, on the twelfth of September, the erection of a fort. The building of this fort by Virginia nearly a hundred miles west of Winchester (then a frontier post) is only paralleled by the energy of Massachusetts in building two forts in the same year on the Kennebec River—Fort Western and Fort Halifax. New York had almost forgotten her frontier forts at Saratoga and Oswego, and the important portage between the Hudson and Lake George was undefended while the French were building both Fort Ticonderoga and Fort Frederick (Crown Point) on Lake Champlain. New York and New England could have seized and fortified Lake Champlain prior to French encroachment as easily as Virginia could fortify Wills Creek. Virginia, however, had been assisted from the royal chest, while the assemblies of the other colonies were in the customary state of turmoil, governor against legislature. The intermediate province of Pennsylvania, home of the peaceful Quakers, looked askance upon the darkening war-clouds and had done little or nothing for the protection of her populous frontiers. As a result, therefore, the Virginian route to the French, though longest and most difficult, was made, by the erection of Fort Cumberland at Wills Creek, at once the most conspicuous.
Fort Cumberland, named in honor of the Duke of Cumberland, Captain-general of the English Army, was located on an eminence between Wills Creek and the Potomac, two hundred yards from the former and about four hundred yards from the latter. Its length was approximately two hundred yards and its breadth nearly fifty yards; and "is built," writes an eye-witness in 1755, "by logs driven into the ground, and about 12 feet above it, with embrasures for 12 guns, and 10 mounted 4 pounders, besides stocks for swivels, and loop holes for small arms." As the accompanying map indicates, the fort was built with a view to the protection of the storehouses erected at the mouth of Wills Creek by the Ohio Company. This is another suggestion of the close connection between the commercial and military expansion of Virginia into the Ohio basin. Wherever a storehouse of the Ohio Company was erected a fort soon followed—with the exception of the strategic position at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela where English fort building was brought to a sudden end by the arrival of the French, who, on English beginnings, erected Fort Duquesne in 1754. A little fort at the mouth of Redstone Creek on the Monongahela had been erected in 1753 but that, together with the blasted remains of Fort Necessity, fell into the hands of the French in the campaign of 1754. Consequently, at the dawning of the memorable year 1755, Fort Cumberland was the most advanced English position in the West. The French Indian allies saw to it that it was safe for no Englishman to step even one pace nearer the Ohio; they skulked 
Plan of Fort Cumberland, and Vicinity; Dated February, 1755
[Showing buildings of the Ohio Company across the Potomac River]
(From the original in British Museum)