It is a fact, remarkable to us now, that the first to bring a challenge
from behind the mountains to that brave and isolate garrison sitting in
Fort Duquesne at the junction of the water paths, was Washington ("Sir
Washington," as one chronicler has written it), not Washington the
American but Washington the English subject, major in the colonial
militia, envoy of an English governor of Virginia, Dinwiddie, who, having
acquired a controlling interest in the Ohio Company, became especially
active in planning to seat a hundred families on that transmontane estate
of a half-million acres and so to win title to it.
"So complicated [were] the political interests of [that] time that a shot
fired in America [was] the signal for setting all Europe together by the
ears," wrote Voltaire, [Footnote: Voltaire, "The French in America" in his
"Short Studies in English and American Subjects," p. 249.] and "it was not
a cannon-shot" that gave the signal but, as Parkman said, "a volley from
the hunting pieces of a few backwoodsmen, commanded by a Virginia youth,
George Washington.
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