that the Ohio country was hers and that there she would
allow no English to dwell.

Legardeur de Saint-Pierre could hardly have known, when he left the hard
region of the Saskatchewan in 1752, that a year later he would be sent
to protect another set of outposts of France in the West. In 1753 we
find him in command of the French forces in the Ohio country. Celoron
had been sent to Detroit. If Saint-Pierre had played his part feebly on
the Saskatchewan, he was now made for a brief period one of the central
figures in the opening act of a world drama. It is with a touch of
emotion that we see on the stage, as the opponent of this not great
Frenchman, the momentous figure of George Washington.

The fight for North America was now rapidly approaching its final phase
in the struggle which we know as the Seven Years' War. During forty
years, commissioners of the two nations had been trying to reach some
agreement as to boundaries. Each side, however, made impossible demands.
France claimed all the lands drained by the St. Lawrence and the Great
Lakes and by the Mississippi and its tributaries a claim which, if made
good, would have carried her into the very heart of the colony of New
York and would have given her also the mastery of the Ohio and the
regions beyond. Britain claimed all the lands ever occupied by the
Iroquois Indians, who had been recognized as British subjects by the
Treaty of Utrecht. As those Indians had overrun regions north of the
St. Lawrence, the British thus would become masters of a good part of
Canada. Neither side was prepared for reasonable compromise. The sword
was to be the final arbiter.

Events moved rapidly towards war. In 1753 Duquesne, the new Governor of
Canada, sent more than a thousand men to build Fort Le Boeuf, on upper
waters flowing to the Ohio and within easy reach of support by way of
Lake Erie. In the nest year the French were swarming in the Ohio Valley,
stirring up the Indians against the English and confident of success.
They jeered at the divisions among the English and believed their own
unity so strong that they could master the colonies one by one. The two
colonies most affected were Pennsylvania and Virginia, either of them
quite ready to see its own citizens advance into the Ohio country and
possess the land, but neither of them willing to unite with the other in
effective military action to protect the frontier.

It is at this crisis that there appears for the first tim