a, seeing the approaching danger,
made the greatest efforts to induce the other colonies to join in
common action; but North Carolina, alone, answered the appeal, and gave
money enough to raise three or four hundred men. Two independent
companies maintained by England in New York, and one in South Carolina,
received orders to march to Virginia. The governor had raised, with
great difficulty, three hundred men. They were called the Virginia
Regiment. An English gentleman named Joshua Fry was appointed the
colonel, and Washington their major.

Fry was at Alexandria, on the Potomac, with half the regiment.
Washington, with the other half, had pushed forward to the storehouse
at Wills Creek, which was to form the base of operations. Besides
these, Captain Trent, with a band of backwoodsmen, had crossed the
mountain to build a fort at the forks of the Ohio, where Pittsburgh now
stands.

Trent had gone back to Wills Creek, leaving Ensign Ward, with forty
men, at work upon the fort, when, on the 17th of April, a swarm of
canoes came down the Allegheny, with over five hundred Frenchmen, who
planted cannon against the unfinished stockade, and summoned the ensign
to surrender. He had no recourse but to submit, and was allowed to
depart, with his men, across the mountains.

The French at once set to, to build a strong fort, which they named
Fort Duquesne. While the governor of Virginia had been toiling, in
vain, to get the colonists to move, the French had acted promptly, and
the erection of their new fort at once covered their line of
communication to the west, barred the advance of the English down the
Ohio valley, and secured the allegiance of all the wavering Indian
tribes.

Although war had not yet been declared between England and France, the
colonists, after this seizure, by French soldiers, of a fort over which
the English flag was flying, henceforth acted as if the two powers were
at war. Washington moved forward from Wills Creek with his hundred and
fifty men, and surprised a French force which had gone out scouting.
Several of the French were killed, and the commander of Fort Duquesne
sent despatches to France to say that he had sent this party out with a
communication to Washington, and that they had been treacherously
assassinated.

This obscure skirmish was the commencement of a war which set two
continents on fire. Colonel Fry died a few days after this fight, and
Washington succeeded to the command of the re