George Washington's Western Adventure

The 1784 trek and the encounter with squatters have been largely a footnote in the biographies of George Washington. Douglas Southall Freeman allots the expedition 14 fine and evocative paragraphs in his seven-volume biography. John Marshall, one of the first Washington biographers, gives the '84 trip precisely 15 words. Marshall's contemporary David Ramsay is even more efficient, summarizing the entire 680-mile frontier adventure in nine words (". . . he made a tour as far west as Pittsburgh . . .").

The trek never became part of Washington lore. There are countless 19th-century engravings illustrating highlights of Washington's life, but the artists somehow missed this particular chapter. It may be that what happened failed to fit into the narrative that biographers were fashioning for the great man. The western trek reveals Washington at his most appealing but also at his most imperious. He's wonderfully intrepid, unafraid to sleep out in the open in a thunderstorm -- but he's also an aggressive entrepreneur, disdainful of the westerners.

The 1784 journey gives us a glimpse of an infant nation, destiny uncertain, sprawled upon a wild and tantalizing landscape. It shows some of the first steps in the creation of what would become a continental nation, and eventually the most powerful country on the planet. Most of all, it provides an unusually vivid look at a man whose personal issues had a way of becoming national ones.

IN THOSE DAYS, a forest covered most of the American backcountry. This was a gloomy world, and a person could walk for miles without encountering a sunbeam. From a bluff, a traveler looking down on the forest would see a surprisingly uniform canopy, with a slash or dip here and there to signify a stream. But rising above the tree line would be a few giants -- the white pines, soaring 50 feet higher than everything else, surveying their domain. White pines were prized timber, so beautifully straight, perfect for masts, easily sawed, lightweight, buoyant, a wood so congenial that this tree alone could entice a person halfway across the continent. Sycamores leaned over the creeks and rivers, hollow inside, roomy enough that a family could live in the trunk while building a cabin. (Washington once found a sycamore that, three feet above the ground, measured 44 feet 10 inches in circumference.)

The agents of change act on different scales. Mountains form over tens of millions of years; animals evolve and become extinct over millions of years; ice ages come and go on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands of years; and the works of human beings take place in decades, years, months, days. As Washington rode across the mountains, he knew the West had changed dramatically since his last visit, 14 years earlier.

Naturally he didn't know about plate tectonics, could not imagine that entire continents could move. Washington had no inkling that life evolved, that from a single primordial germ a diverse array of organisms could appear, that giant reptiles once roamed the planet, that the flora and fauna that framed his life had not sprung fully into existence at the moment of the Creation. And yet the general knew facts that later generations would forget. He knew the names of the trees, the habits of the animals. He knew the soils and the rocks, the resources beneath his feet. He knew where to find useful mud and fuel for the fire. He knew how to read the sky and measure the wind and smell the coming of a storm. Washington had abundant knowledge of the western terrain, from a lifetime of exploration and adventure. He knew where he was on the planet.

THE SECEDERS were part of a great migration of people into the West. For decades, European Americans and African Americans had been pooling on the eastern side of the Appalachians, constrained first by the Indians and the French, then by the British proclamation that the western waters would be reserved to the Indians. But the Revolution opened the floodgates. The powers of attraction of the West, which so many times had yanked Washington from the comforts of his Mount Vernon estate, had an even more powerful effect on landless people.

There was a presumption underlying this westward movement, a belief that the continental interior was in some fundamental way unoccupied, that although the Indians had lived there for millennia and knew every trail and stream, every spring and salt lick, and had built villages and raised crops and interred their dead in ceremonial mounds, they still did not own these ancestral lands. The native Americans didn't have any use for the concept of private property and found bizarre the European belief in imaginary lines that enclosed the natural world. So it was all up for grabs.

The Scotch-Irish, Germans and French were in the vanguard of the western assault, along with Finns and Swedes. In addition to families, there were many lone wolves, usually young men fleeing the backbreaking labor of the indigo and rice fields of the Deep South or recently released from debtors' prison. For many Americans, the dangers and deprivations of the West, the terror of Indian raids, the shortage of staples and ordinary comforts, were still a step up in life.

Voyagers to the West had to supply all their own needs as they migrated. For food they would hunt deer, bear, wild turkey and perhaps the occasional squirrel, raccoon or groundhog. At the end of their journey through the forest would be nothing as coherent as a village or town, just a patch of woods along a river or stream. Many a family made a clearing in the forest and, using nothing but an axe, built a cabin, complete with wooden hinges, wooden pins, wooden chinking (held in place by clay or mud), even a wooden chimney. Packed clay served well enough for a floor.

Peace, as a rule, did not follow the settlers as they infiltrated the domain of the Indian. When the frontiersmen weren't killing Indians, they were inventing ways of maiming one another. Eye-gouging became something of a sport, and the countryside had an unusually large number of one-eyed men. The historian Leland Baldwin reported that a "fair fight" meant the use of fists and nothing more, but the "rough and tumble" was the more common form of frontier combat, one in which "the endeavor of each man was to maim and disfigure the other by gouging out his eyes, biting off his lips, nose, or ears, or kicking him in the groin." These people did not follow Washington's maxims for gentlemanly behavior.

Whiskey cost three cents a glass. Wagoneers would dance to a fiddler, drink all night and never repair to their room, since they had no room, only a claim to a few square feet on the barroom floor. They smoked a crude cigar that emitted a mephitic stench and cost four for a penny. That such twists of tobacco were smoked by drivers of Conestoga wagons gave the cigars their enduring name: stogies.

When George Washington moved among frontier folk, he didn't mix. He passed over these people like a dark nimbus cloud. To be George Washington required an adherence to certain principles, behaviors and beliefs that could properly be described as elitist, and that elitism wasn't superficial, it came from the marrow. Whatever he found common in himself he tried to purge. He once referred to ordinary farmers as "the grazing multitude." Apparently, he did not subscribe to the Jeffersonian dictum that yeoman farmers were God's chosen people.

And now the general had to meet face to face with these squatters. In his diary, one can sense a steady reddening of Washington's visage. They "came here to set forth their pretensions to it; & enquire into my right," he wrote. They attempted to "discover all the flaws they could in my Deed."

The energetic editors at The Papers of George Washington, and the 19th-century historian Boyd Crumrine of Washington County, Pa., have done heroic work in trying to untangle the legal knots around the property, though this may require several more centuries of labor. It appears that in 1763, a war veteran named John Posey, one of Washington's neighbors, obtained a military warrant (as payment for service in the French and Indian War) for 3,000 acres between Millers Run and Raccoon Creek, in the primeval forest southwest of Forks of the Ohio. A few years later, William Crawford told Washington about Posey's land. Washington obtained Posey's warrant in exchange for forgiving a debt. (In none of these transactions did any actual money change hands.) Late that year, or perhaps early in 1771, Washington recalled, Crawford surveyed 2,813 acres near Millers Run in Washington's name. But the backcountry trader George Croghan, an ambitious man with his own aspirations of a western empire, claimed the land and encouraged a number of settlers to move in.

The situation at that point turned downright devilish. To secure rights to a piece of property, the owner had to improve it by clearing land, putting up fences or building a cabin. Crawford, representing Washington's interests, arranged for a man to build a cabin on the Millers Run site. That single, humble dwelling -- as lost amid the 2,813 acres as a mollusk at the bottom of a lake -- supposedly satisfied the improvement requirement. But then Croghan's people built their own cabin inches from the first. They simply blocked the door to the first cabin. If there had been someone inside he would have died of thirst.

Now, more than a decade later, September 14, 1784, Washington and the Seceders faced off at the mill and explained their respective positions. They resolved nothing -- except that they'd meet again in a few days, when Washington would visit Millers Run and see the land himself.

The next day, the general tried to sell his gristmill to the highest bidder. A crowd formed, but Washington quickly realized that the people had not come to bid on the mill. They were there to gawk, to see the famous George Washington. He had serious business to conduct, and they seemed to view the whole thing as entertainment.

He called for bids.

No one answered.