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24 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