Washington [331]
For this rugged journey across the Appalachian Mountains, Washington loaded up the horses with a large tent, camp utensils, a boat, medicine, and hooks and lines for fishing. He retraced the footsteps of earlier journeys into the western country, a landscape rife with youthful memories, including the march with Braddock’s army. Still a fearless traveler, he didn’t shrink from roughing it—at one campsite he slept under nothing but his cloak in a torrential downpour—but his diaries contain more references to fatigue than in earlier years as well as to rain running in rivulets down the trails.
A man of strongly fixed enthusiasms, Washington was also bent on reviving his long-standing but stalled project of improving the Potomac River navigation. He was still bedazzled by the vision of a watery gateway to the Ohio Valley that ran right by his home. When he arrived at Berkeley Springs, he came under the sway of a gifted inventor endowed with glib patter, James Rumsey, who had devised a mechanical boat that could churn upstream against the current. Always open to innovation, Washington was beguiled by Rumsey’s craft. Spying a way to promote Potomac traffic, he did more than pay lip service to this device: he issued a written endorsement for Rumsey, vouching that he had actually seen his ungainly invention move upstream against the current.
When Washington stopped at his property at Great Meadows, scene of the Fort Necessity debacle, he made no reference in his diary to its bloody history. As before the war, he scrutinized the western frontier with the coolly appraising eyes of a landlord. He seemed exclusively concerned with the meadow’s commercial value, commenting that it would make “a very good stand for a tavern. Much hay may be cut here when the ground is laid down in grass and the upland, east of the meadow, is good for grain.”12 Unsentimental about property, he ordered his local agent to rent the tract “for the most you can get for the term of ten years.”13
In this wilderness area, Washington’s fame counted for little and even exposed him to heightened danger. Protecting it as their rightful territory, Indians had engaged in violent confrontations with settlers on the northwest side of the Ohio River. Congress had banned settlers from this region, but speculators were still drawn by visions of colossal land grabs. “Men in these times talk with as much facility of fifty, a hundred, and even 500,000 acres as a gentleman formerly would do of 1,000 acres,” noted Washington, who sounded sympathetic to Indian grievances. 14 Upon hearing stories of murdered settlers, he canceled a scheduled trip down the Ohio. “Had you proceeded on your tour down the river,” one adviser told him, “I believe it would have been attended with the most dreadful consequences.” The Indians had seized General James Wilkinson under the mistaken impression that he was Washington, and only with “much difficulty of persuasion and gifts” had he escaped.15 To Washington’s consternation, the violent clashes with Indians prevented him from visiting his extensive bounty lands on the Ohio and Great Kanawha rivers—lots measured not in feet but in miles—which were being brazenly offered for sale by speculators as far away as Europe.
On September 14 Washington had his first encounter with the families that had allegedly invaded his property Millers Run (not far from today’s Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, southwest of Pittsburgh). While Washington’s deputy, William Crawford, had surveyed the property as early as 1771, squatters contended that they had come upon an empty tract and occupied it before the patent was granted. If Washington expected special deference in these remote mountain hollows, he quickly learned otherwise. On the frontier, he did not enjoy the veneration he did back east, a rowdy new democratic culture having taken root.
As he bargained with poor, defiant settlers, members of a dissenting Presbyterian sect, Washington sounded a different note from his rhapsodic speech to John Witherspoon