[ Follows track of Washington’s Road; near by, on the right, Washington found Jumonville’s “embassy” hidden in the Ravine ]...

The following pages are largely devoted to Washington and his times as seen from the standpoint of the road he opened across the Alleghanies in 1754. Portions of this volume have appeared in the Interior , the Ohio State Archæological and Historical Quarterly , and in a monograph, Colonel Washington , issued by Western Reserve University. The author’s debt to Mr. Robert McCracken, Mr. Louis Fazenbaker, and Mr. James Hadden, all of Pennsylvania, is gratefully acknowledged. A. B. H. Marietta, Ohio

If you journey today from Cumberland, Maryland, on the Potomac, across the Alleghanies to Pittsburg on the Ohio, you will follow the most historic highway of America, through scenes as memorable as any on our continent. You may make this journey on any of the three thoroughfares: by the Cumberland Road, with all its memorials of the gay coaching days “when life was interwoven with white and purple,” by Braddock’s Road, which was used until the Cumberland Road was opened in 1818, or by Washington

It must be next to impossible for one in this day to realize what a tangled wilderness this West was a century and a half ago. “The thing which puzzles us,” writes W. H. H. Murray, “is not the past but the future; not the door which has been shut, but the strange door which has never been opened.... For who, though knocking with reddened knuckles against it may start even an echo?” True words indeed; yet were the task put to us, it is to be seriously doubted if we of untrained imagination could

In the year fifteen hundred and forty, Jacques Cartier raised a white cross crowned with the fleur-de-lis of France upon an improvised altar of crossed canoe paddles at Quebec, bearing the inscription “ Franciscus Primus, Dei gratia, Francorum Rex Regnat ,” and formally took possession of a new continent. Two centuries later, in the dawn of early morning, British soldiers wrested from the betrayed Montcalm the mist-enshrouded height where that emblazoned cross had stood, and New France fell—“ami

A thousand vague rumors came over the mountains to Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia in 1753, of French aggressions on the upper Ohio, the more alarming because vague and uncertain. Orders were now at hand from London, authorizing the erection of a fort on the Ohio to hold that river for England and conciliate the Indians to English rule. But the governor was too much in the dark as to the operations of the French to warrant any decisive step, and he immediately looked about him for a person whom h

No literary production of a youth of twenty-one ever electrified the world as did the publication of the Journal of this dauntless envoy of the Virginian governor. No young man more instantly sprang into the notice of the world than George Washington. The journal was copied far and wide in the newspapers of the other colonies. It sped across the sea, and was printed in London by the British government. In a manly, artless way it told the exact situation on the Ohio frontier and announced the fir

It is probable that, as early as 1753, after his return from his mission to the French forts, George Washington first introduced the subject of uniting the East and West by means of public highways. If England was to hold the West she must have a passageway to it. The project involved very great expense and Governor Dinwiddie paid little heed to it. Had Virginia acted on the young Washington’s suggestion, how much life and treasure would have been saved! Braddock could not but have been successf