George Washington at the Future Location of Fort Duquesne

Francis Russell writes, "In the spring of 1753 the ominous news came to Governor Robert Dinwiddie that the French had built Fort Preq'isle near Lake Erie and Fort Le Boeuf in that part of the Ohio country claimed as part of his Majesty's Colony of Virginia... In November [Dinwiddie] sent a tall, grave-faced twenty-one-year-old Virginia adjutant, George Washington, with a party of seven to carry a warning to the French commander at Le Boeuf, and at the same time, to take a good look at what was going on there...Washington had never been so far west before. Passing the wedge of land where the Monongahela and the Alleghany rivers join to form the Ohio, he carefully noted that the first party to fortify that triangle would control the strategic river." (The French and Indian Wars, New York, 1962, p. 86)