right to call the land theirs; and when the last century opened France had begun to take possession in a manner more vigorous than it had before adopted. Its series of forts and settlements gradually increased in number until a communicating chain of French posts extended from Quebec, "where summer hurries through the sky," to the sultry regions of the gulf. It had forts on Ontario, at Crown Point, on Lake Champlain, at Niagara, Erie, Sandusky, Detroit, Mackinaw and Chicago; it built Fort Le Boeuf at the head of French Creek, called Venango by the Indians, and another at its mouth; and at important points elsewhere its claims were backed by actual occupation.

Meanwhile the English colonists had begun not only to look, but to move, toward the valley. The Indian traders were each year carrying their operations further west, until at last it occurred to them to scale the Alleghanies and penetrate the Indian country beyond. Pennsylvanians and Virginians ventured down the Ohio carly in the century and mingled with the tribes. According to an Indian statement at a Council in Albany in 1754, the English had been on the Ohio for thirty years before that date. But when the time came, it was not upon these adventurous excursions that the English based their claims to the valley. The colonists had pursued a shrewd policy in seeking

actual possession of the land from a ruler with greater authority over "the beautiful river" and its branches than any ruler in Europe. As early as 1684 they had secured by treaty with the Iroquois a grant of an immense stretch of country south and east of the Illinois, for the Confederacy claimed as its own all the lands occupied by subjugated tribes and a trifle more, perhaps. Again in 1726 the English wheedled the Iroquois into giving them the care of all of the lands claimed by the league. At a later day the colonists made an actual purchase if we may give the transaction that name - of land in the Ohio Valley. This purchase was made at Lancaster in Pennsylvania, in 1744. The Delawares were present, but the Iroquois dictated the terms. Four years later at Logstown, an Indian village on the Ohio, the Virginians. made presents to the red men, who were naturally inclined to feel irritable over what the Iroquois had done at Lancester, but who promised not to disturb any of the settlements which the whites might make south of the Ohio.

The Virginians were sufficiently pleased with the result of their conference here to decide definately upon a scheme which they had in mind. This scheme was to organize a company to carry on trading in skins and furs; to take the trade. from roving speculators and place it in the hands

of a corporation. Thomas Lee and twelve other Virgnians, among them Lawrence and Augustine Washington, set about forming the Ohio Land Company. A petition to the King was granted, and Virgnia gave the company half a million acres in the valley, within the limits of the tract claimed by Virginia. The land was granted on the condition that it should be colonized.* Christopher Gist was sent out to explore the country, in which the company expected to operate and to lay out a town and fort at the mouth of Chartiers Creek on the Ohio.

Gist's journey carried him among many of the tribes, which were, in the main, well disposed towards the English. A journal kept by Gist is one of the most curious records of this period. In it the surveyor describes the villages of the Miamis, the Wyandots, and the Shawanees, the habits of the traders, and the uncertainties introduced by the aggressive conduct of the French. Gist found here and there in the valley small groups of Delawares, sometimes but three or four families forming a quaint community, and these, like the Delawares of the East, called the English "brothers." At the head of one party of traders among the Wyandots was George Croghan, afterwards deputy Indian

* At least one hundred families were to be located within seven years and a fort erected for their protection,

At White

agent under Sir William Johnson. Woman's Creek Gist saw Mary Harris, who was stolen from New England when a child, and who now, at fifty, had an Indian husband and several children. "She still remembers," says Gist, “they used to be very religious in New England, and wonders how the white men can be so wicked as she had seen them in these woods." The Shawanees were at this time encamped on both sides of the Ohio just below the Scioto. After Gist's visit they were found further up the Scioto and in the Miami Valley. They had sought the friendship of the Miamis on first entering the valley of the Ohio.

The company now began the building of its trading house on the Ohio, to the increased annoyance of the French, who had been pursuing an elaborate method of securing the river and its tributaries. Governor La Galissonière had sent Céloron de Bienville with a force of men to set up wooden crosses and bury leaden plates at the mouth of every stream flowing into the Ohio. These plates, some of which have since been found, bore a rudely engraved inscription setting forth the claims of the French king. An English trader captured by the French, was sent by Céloron to the Governor of Pennsylvania with a letter in which British traders were forbidden to visit the region of

the Ohio. Finding that neither their crosses and leaden plates nor their emphatic warnings were of any avail, the French, with a party of Indian allies, descended upon a British trading post among the Miamis, a post described as the first British settlement in the valley, killed a number of Miamis, whose braves were nearly all absent on a hunting trip, and captured two traders.

The French were determined; and so were the colonists. England and France were trying to settle the quarrel on the other side of the Atlantic, but neither side was ready to yield anything. The people on this side of the Atlantic were in very much the same frame of mind. Now that there had been bloodshed the colonists resolved upon sending a formal remonstrance to the French commander. The Virginians looked about them for some one who should carry this protest to the French headquarters at the head of the valley, and for the hazardous undertaking they found a volunteer in George Washington.