It is in that lonely ravine up among the ridges which I have described in
an earlier chapter that the union of the eastern and western waters began.
And there should be a monument beside Jumonville's to keep succeeding
generations mindful of the mighty consequence of what happened then.
This fray of the mountains was one of the most portentous of events in
American history. It was not only the grappling of two European peoples
and two systems of government out upon the edges of the civilized world--
the stone-age men assisting on both sides--a fray in which Legardeur de
St. Pierre, Coulon de Jumonville, and de Villiers, his avenging brother,
were France, and Washington was England. It was the beginning of the
making of a new nation, of which that tall youth, who found the whizzing
of bullets a "charming sound," was to be the very cornerstone.
He was here having his first tuition of war. De Villiers let him march
back from Fort Necessity unharmed, when he might, perhaps, have ended the
career of this young major in the great meadows where they fought "through
the gray veil of mists and rain.
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