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The Fort Necessity Campaign
RIVALRY OF FRANCE AND ENGLAND. In 1749, the Marquis
de la Galissonière, Governor General of Canada, sent
Pierre-Joseph Celoron de Blainville with about 215 Frenchmen and a force
of Indians to take possession of the Ohio Valley for France. The
expedition set out from La Chine, Canada, in birchbark canoes and
eventually reached the headwaters of the Allegheny River. At Lake
Chautauqua, and along the Allegheny, Ohio, and Great Miami Rivers,
Blainville posted notices on trees and buried lead plates graven with an
inscription asserting that the adjacent lands belonged to the French
Crown.
The British likewise had become interested in the
fertile lands of the Ohio Valley. Several prominent Englishmen and
Virginians, among them Lawrence and Augustine Washington, elder brothers
of George, appreciating the potential value of the area and the
possibilities for trading posts and settlements, organized the Ohio
Company in 1748. The following year, the company obtained from the
British Crown a grant of 200,000 acres on both sides of the Ohio between
the Monongahela and Great Kanawha Rivers. An additional 300,000 acres
was promised if 100 families were settled on the first tract within 7
years. Fearing the encroachment of Pennsylvania settlers, as well as the
French, the Ohio Company established a base of operations at Wills
Creek, now Cumberland, Md. The company directed the opening of a wagon
road to the Monongahela River over a path blazed by Nemacolin, a
friendly Delaware Indian. Christopher Gist, explorer and guide, was
engaged to locate lands and to determine whether conditions on the
extreme frontier were suitable for settlements.
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