Washington [103]
Washington also claimed land under a 1763 royal proclamation that promised land to veterans of the French and Indian War. He had his brother Charles buy up veterans’ claims under his own name, even though Washington was their undisclosed owner; on another occasion, he effected such a purchase under Lund Washington’s name. Washington also wanted to circumvent a regulation that limited land grants to officers who had remained with the Virginia Regiment until it dissolved in 1762. Since he had resigned before then, he had Charles buy up claims from those who had served until the end, instructing his brother to operate stealthily and “not let it be known that I have any concern therein.”41 When he purchased one property stretching more than forty miles along the Great Kanawha, he flouted a law prohibiting riverfront properties from being more than three times as long as they were deep, a way to prevent monopolies of choice riverine acreage. Most officers had a mile and a half of riverfront on their narrow properties, which then extended five miles back into the countryside. Even as Washington developed a wider political vision, he remained extremely aggressive in his real estate dealings. As the biographer James T. Flexner concluded: “In no other direction did Washington demonstrate such acquisitiveness as in his quest for the ownership of land.”42 He was far from alone: hoarding cheap land was a universal madness in Virginia and the other colonies.
In early October 1770, accompanied by Dr. Craik, three slaves, and a packhorse, Washington began a tour of the Ohio Country to inspect properties for himself and his men. He had grown accustomed to having Billy Lee along on these long, rugged journeys, but the young mulatto slave fell ill and stayed behind. On this nine-week expedition, Washington felt an acute sense of urgency, since settlers were already flocking to the Ohio and Great Kanawha rivers, and he feared they might preempt the most productive soil. He also got wind of a huge scheme by English investors to obtain 2.5 million acres and inaugurate a new colony, Vandalia, whose borders might further curtail the bounty lands. When the British ministry approved this scheme, rebuffing a petition from Washington’s Mississippi Land Company, he darkly decried London’s “malignant disposition towards Americans,” adding yet another grievance to his lengthening litany of complaints against Crown policies.43
During one leg of the journey, Washington was staying about four miles from present-day Pittsburgh when an Indian chief called the White Mingo and other chiefs of the Six Nations requested a meeting. The White Mingo bestowed upon Washington a ceremonial string of wampum, then stunned him with a vivid recollection dating back to the French and Indian conflict. Washington noted the gist of this speech in his diary: “that as I was a person who some of them remember to have seen when I was sent on an embassy to the French and most of them had heard of, they were come to bid me welcome to the country and to desire that the people of Virginia wou[l]d consider them as friends and brothers linked together in one chain.”44
As he rode or paddled by canoe, Washington remained attentive to the commercial prospects of this sparsely populated region. In negotiating leases with western farmers, he retained timber and mineral rights and even visited a coal mine. “The coal seemed to be of the very best kind, burning freely and abundance of it,” he remarked in his diary.45 While he negotiated forest paths and mountain passes that he knew from the French and Indian War, he appraised these wild places with a cool business eye. Even though he bought two hundred acres of the Great Meadows in December 1770, he included no mention of its history in his diary. Of the site where