the French War, advancing money to pay expenses in behalf of the common
cause and using his influence in the proper quarters. In August, 1770,
he met many of his former officers at Captain Weedon's in
Fredericksburg, and after they had dined and had talked over old times,
they discussed the subject of their claims until sunset, and it was
decided that Washington should personally make a long and dangerous trip
to the western region.

In October he set out with his old friend Doctor James Craik and three
servants, including the ubiquitous Billy Lee, and on the way increased
the party. They followed the old Braddock Road to Pittsburgh, then a
village of about twenty log cabins, visiting en route some tracts of
land that Crawford had selected. At Pittsburgh they obtained a large
dugout, and with Crawford, two Indians and several borderers, floated
down the Ohio, picking out and marking rich bottom lands and having
great sport hunting and fishing.

The region in which they traveled was then little known and was
unsettled by white men. Daniel Boone had made his first hunting trip
into "the dark and bloody ground of Kaintuckee" only the year before,
and scattered along the banks of the Ohio stood the wigwam villages of
the aboriginal lords of the land. At one such village Washington met a
chief who had accompanied him on his memorable winter journey in 1753 to
warn out the French, and elsewhere talked with Indians who had shot at
him in the battle of the Monongahela and now expressed a belief that he
must be invulnerable. At the Mingo Town they saw a war party of three
score painted Iroquois on their way to fight the far distant Catawbas.
Between the Indians and the white men peace nominally reigned, but
rumors were flying of impending uprisings, and the Red Man's smouldering
hate was soon to burst into the flame known as Lord Dunmore's War. Once