s 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
the party was alarmed by a report that the Indians had killed two white
men, but they breathed easier on learning that the sole basis of the
story was that a trader had tried to swim his horse across the Ohio and
had been drowned. In spite of uncertainties, the voyagers continued to
the Great Kanawha and paddled about fourteen miles up that stream. Near
its mouth Washington located two large tracts for himself and military
comrades and after interesting hunting experiences and inspecting some
enormous sycamores--concerning which matters more hereafter--the party
turned back, and Washington reached home after an absence of nine weeks.

Two of Washington's western tracts are of special interest. One had been
selected by Crawford in 1767 and was "a fine piece of land on a stream
called Chartiers Creek" in the present Washington County, southwest of
Pittsburgh. Crawford surveyed the tract and marked it by blazed trees,
built four cabins and cleared a patch of ground, as an improvement,
about each. Later Washington, casting round for some one from whom to
obtain a mili