Washington [16]
Thus in March 1748 sixteen-year-old George Washington saddled his horse and joined his friend George William Fairfax on a surveying expedition across the Blue Ridge Mountains, plunging into the wilds of the Shenandoah Valley. Their mission was to carve up Lord Fairfax’s acreage into salable leaseholds. To mark this rite of passage, George Washington set quill to paper and began a travel diary entitled “A Journal of My Journey over the Mountains.” It represents his earliest piece of writing of any length. Here, beyond the pale of Virginia society, he told of pounding rains that swelled rivers and mountain winds that played havoc with his belongings. Overflowing waterways had to be forded, primitive roads traversed. Washington navigated canoes down whitewater streams in driving rain, shot wild turkey, and slept on bearskins under the stars or in smoky tents. This was a raw, violent world such as Washington had never experienced before, but he adapted to it with remarkable speed and aplomb and quickly grew inured to hardship.
This fastidious young man learned to deal with the many earthy surprises presented by frontier life. Early in the trip, when the group stayed with a Captain Isaac Pennington, George made the mistake of expecting clean, comfortable quarters. After he stripped off his clothes and climbed into the rustic bed, he found it to be “nothing but a little straw, matted together without sheets or anything else, but only one threadbare blanket with double its weight of vermin, such as lice, fleas, etc.” He promptly got up and put back on his clothes. Worn out from a day of riding, he managed to fall asleep, but resolved henceforth “to sleep in the open air before a fire.”17 The next night at Fredericktown, he got a feather bed with fresh sheets and fumigated the lice he had picked up the previous night.
On March 23 Washington registered his first encounter with Native Americans, depicting his party as “agreeably surprised” by meeting thirty Indians fresh from battle who were dismayed to be bearing only a single scalp. Washington and his group plied the Indians with liquor, which prompted them to form a circle and leap about in a war dance, accompanied by a deerskin drum and the dry rattle of a gourd. George described how the “best dancer jumps up as one awaked out of a sleep and runs and jumps about the ring in a most comical manner.”18 Despite the martial nature of the dance, the gory detail of the scalp, and the fact that they had goaded the Indians into getting drunk, the young surveyor only saw something picturesque and outlandish in the spectacle. Still insular in his reactions, he chided one group of Dutch settlers as “ignorant” because they “would never speak English, but when spoken to, they speak all Dutch.”19 A patronizing streak in George later emerged when he derided some settlers as “a parcel of barbarians and an uncouth set of people.”20 Whatever his inner reservations about the frontier folk, George succeeded in handling them with uncommon finesse.
That George, tutored by Lawrence and the Fairfax family, was already a well-bred young man is reflected in his disdain for the crude existence he confronted. Yet a rugged side of his nature gloried in this unruly world. Possessed of unusual equanimity, he showed that he could shuttle gracefully between worlds of extreme gentility and roughness. He became accustomed to roasting food on sharpened sticks over open fires and dining on wooden chips instead of plates. Nothing appeared to faze him. One windy night in early April, George awoke to discover that the straw mat he was sleeping on had caught fire; luckily, one of the men woke up and stamped it out. The next night was even more blustery. “We had our tent carried quite off with the wind and