It was then that the young farmer, surveyor, soldier, just come of age,
was chosen to carry a message to the commander of the nearest French fort
in the valley--Fort Le Boeuf, which I have already described--about
fifteen miles from Lake Erie on the slight elevation from which the waters
begin to flow toward the Mississippi. The commander was Legardeur de St.
Pierre, a one-eyed veteran of wars, but recently come from an expedition
out across the valley toward the Rockies.
Parkman has made this picture of the momentous meeting of France and
America in the western wilderness, which in its peopling has kept only a
single tree of those forests, a tree pointed out to me as the Washington
tree, though it, too, may have come with the migrants:
"The surrounding forests had dropped their leaves, and in gray and patient
desolation bided the coming winter. Chill rains drizzled over the gloomy
'clearing,' and drenched the palisades and log-built barracks, raw from
the axe. Buried in the wilderness, the military exiles [Legardeur and his
garrison] resigned themselves as they might to months of monotonous
solitude; when, just after sunset on the eleventh of December, a tall
youth [and he was only an inch shorter than Lincoln, six feet three
inches] came out of the forest on horseback, attended by a companion much
older and rougher than himself, and followed by several Indians and four
or five white men with packhorses.
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