Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 3).djvu/89

 CHAPTER IV

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 he could trust to find out what was really happening in the Ohio valley.

Who was to be this envoy? The mission called for a person of unusual capacity: a diplomat, a soldier, and a frontiersman. There were five hundred miles to be