Washington [32]
What converted this local skirmish into a worldwide incident was the identity of one victim: Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de Jumonville, thirty-five, who bore an important diplomatic message to the British, demanding their evacuation from the Ohio Country. According to one account, as Jumonville read this ultimatum, the Half King stepped forward, split open his head with a hatchet, then dipped his hands into the skull, rinsed them with the victim’s brains, and scalped him. What is beyond dispute is that Washington abruptly found himself presiding over atrocities, as his Indian allies swooped down on the remaining Frenchmen “to knock the poor, unhappy wounded on the head and bereave them of their scalps,” as he wrote.14 This was a curiously ironic way to describe a bloodbath, as if Washington wished to distance himself from the horror or pretend it was merely routine. The Indians’ behavior placed him in an excruciating predicament, for he didn’t wish to repudiate them after their victory or threaten their alliance. We don’t know how many Frenchmen were murdered by Indian hatchets rather than British muskets.
In their radically different version of events, the French claimed that they awoke that morning to find themselves hemmed in by Indians and Englishmen, with the latter firing first. Through an interpreter, Monsieur de Jumonville beseeched the English to cease firing, and when they did, he read aloud his ultimatum. The French claimed that, while reading this message, Jumonville was shot through the head by a musket and that the remaining French would have been annihilated had not the Indians rushed between them and the English, averting further bloodshed.
Washington may have exaggerated the British role in killing the Frenchmen to establish his own military credentials. Whatever the exact sequence of events, he overstated his certainty that the French were spying on him and stalking his movements; his letter to Dinwiddie had admitted to doubts about the nocturnal spying incident. Afterward, when the French prisoners insisted that they had come only to deliver a warning, Washington scoffed at the claim. “They informed me that they had been sent with a summons to order me to depart. A plausible pretense to discover our camp and to obtain the knowledge of our forces and our situation!”15 A genuine diplomat, he maintained, would have traveled straight to him and presented his message in a forthright manner. Washington was convinced that French espionage was merely the prelude to a murderous assault on his men. Still, the French party was so small that, whatever its true intent, it hardly seemed to constitute a dire threat to the British.
The French version likewise lacks plausibility in several particulars. It is hard to believe that Washington would have allowed a diplomatic messenger to be shot in cold blood, as the French insisted. After all, the previous fall he himself had been in an analogous situation, delivering a stiffly worded warning to the French. He was too cautious to jeopardize his career by murdering an ambassador. On the other hand, the French had already seized the Forks of the Ohio, and Washington may have felt the French and British empires were now at war in all but name. It also strains credulity that the Indians heroically thrust themselves between the French and the British. The Half King had recommended harsh measures against the French detachment, and in letters to Dinwiddie, Washington disclosed that the Indian chief circulated French scalps among friendly tribes as war trophies. The French version seems like a patent