George Washington's Western Adventure

In 1784, the father of our country set off to survey the wilderness empire of the new republic. He also had to collect some rent

On the thirteenth of September, 1784, coming down from the mountains into the valley of the Youghiogheny, George Washington arrived at the gristmill. His gristmill. He had never seen it. Years earlier, before the Revolution, he'd been told that his mill was the finest west of the Alleghenies. But now that he was finally free from his duties as commander in chief, and could make the long journey to inspect the mill personally, he saw to his dismay that it harnessed the might of a feeble stream, a virtual rivulet -- a seep! The millrace was essentially dry. Perhaps the masters of the place were expecting some other source of power to come along, something more sophisticated than water.

The surrounding land boasted some patches of rich soil, but the level tracts were interrupted by gullies, depressions, rocky outcroppings -- "broken" terrain. He owned 1,644 acres of rolling backwoods turf inhabited by people living in extremely modest dwellings. It would someday be named Perrypolis, but for now the residents called this place "Washington's Bottom." What an honor.

"I do not find the Land in general equal to my expectation of it," Washington wrote in his diary. "The Mill was quite destitute of Water . . . In a word, little rent, or good is to be expected . . .

Washington knew who was to blame for the mill disaster: Gilbert Simpson, the mill operator, whom Washington had once described as a man of "extreame stupidity."

When the general finished dealing with Simpson, he knew he'd have to cope with a second, even more irritating problem. A group of people had journeyed to Washington's Bottom to discuss his allegation that they were squatting on his land. They were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who belonged to a sect called Seceders. They lived on Washington's land -- or what Washington claimed was his land -- about half a day's ride to the north, on Millers Run, southwest of Pittsburgh.

Pennsylvania had been founded by Quakers, but these Scotch-Irish were a different breed -- rougher, more belligerent and ready to tromp into every remote mountain hollow of the Appalachians to hack out a new life. They did not come to the mill to give the general a parade. The great man threatened to take away their farms. When they had arrived in this part of western Pennsylvania in the early 1770s -- it was then considered part of the sprawling colony of Virginia -- they had found a trackless forest. They had hacked down trees, burned and grubbed the stumps, built fences, log cabins and barns, and found a way to survive in a world that still knew the howl of the wolf. They had endured the constant risk of Indian attacks, and, indeed, one of their members, Thomas Bigger, had narrowly escaped a massacre that claimed the lives of three families a dozen miles to the west, near Raccoon Creek. And now, years later, they'd gotten word of a visitor, at best an absentee landlord, but perhaps more properly a man with no right to their farms whatsoever.

What bad luck for the Seceders: They had squatted on the wrong man's land. Worse, he was a details freak. George Washington kept track of every shilling he was due, every acre he owned. He had an extraordinary gift for seeing the big picture of America, of perceiving the possibility that on this continent a new and powerful nation might spring into being, something to rival the great powers of Europe -- but he also paid attention to the vexing minutiae of his considerable landholdings. The 52-year-old war hero doubled as an accountant.

The Seceders had several things going for them. In Pennsylvania there was a general presumption that settlers who improved land had priority over an absentee landlord with only a paper title. The Seceders had heard that Washington had a bogus title and that the original surveyor of the land, William Crawford, lacked proper credentials. When they began clearing land and burning stumps, the Seceders had assumed they'd found their place in the world, beyond the machinations of moneymen far to the east. They would grow their corn and wheat, raise their cows and pigs, hunt wild game and worry only about the weather and the threat of Indians, wolves and panthers. That was the plan.

And then the grave, frowning, humorless George Washington himself came riding in. Who could have imagined?

Washington saw himself as the victim, not as a feudal lord showing up to slap around some lowlifes. He felt abused. These people had taken advantage of him. He hadn't been around for the last decade because he'd been busy winning freedom for the nation. He insisted that, although he owned tens of thousands of acres in the West, he was not a land speculator or "monopolizer":

"Indeed, comparatively speaking I possess very little land on the Western Waters," he wrote to his attorney. "To attempt therefore to deprive me of the little I have, is, considering the circumstances under which I have been" -- fighting for liberty! -- "and the inability of attending to my own affairs, not only unjust, but pitifully mean."

The historian Archer Hulbert, in Washington and the West (1905), noted that the general had more than just the Millers Run tract on his mind. He feared that a loss of this one parcel would have a cascading effect, and that he might lose all of his tens of thousands of land in the remote backcountry. Being lenient "would certainly result in the establishment of a precedent that would be ruinous to him; and if Washington could not keep his land, how would the less influential and less powerful fare?" He would fight this battle on behalf of all absentee landlords.

This dispute was, in miniature, the conflict of the continent: Who owned the land? How was that ownership established? Would the laws of the East hold sway in the distant forests of the West? Was the game stacked against the common man, the pioneer, the tribesman? Would ordinary Americans own their own farms or pay rent to far-off aristocrats? Would order triumph, or chaos?

What kind of country was this going to be?

THIS WAS BOTH a business trip for Washington and a chance to scout the terrain of his young nation. In the closing days of the war, he had declared his intention to make a grand tour of the new United States, to take its measure from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi to the Deep South. It was, after all, the fourth-largest country in the world by size, yet much of it was scarcely mapped.

Pressed for time, constrained by his duties at Mount Vernon, Washington had dramatically scaled back his ambitions. The new plan: Ride up the valley of the Potomac, across the mountains, through forests so dark they had names like "the Shades of Death," to the frontier of the nation, and then keep going by canoe down the Ohio River for hundreds of miles, far beyond the outer reaches of what people of his society called civilization.

Washington loved the backcountry and had seen more of it than almost anyone of his generation. He'd slept many times under the stars. He'd spent years as a surveyor, tromping through remote valleys and across swollen rivers, learning the way of the woods, sharing the pipe with Indian chiefs, and imposing imaginary lines on the wilderness. He and Thomas Jefferson had corresponded at great length in recent months about the western country, but while Jefferson was content to remain at Monticello -- in his entire life he never traveled farther west than the Shenandoah Valley -- Washington always had the urge to see things directly, to rub that western soil between his thumb and fingers.

Washington also knew better than anyone how hard it was to get anywhere. The few roads that existed were muddy trenches choked with stumps. In the entire country there was not a single bridge over a major river. The Appalachian Mountains stood like walls between the East and the West. The country was spread out and disconnected to a potentially disastrous degree. Washington feared that the West -- the rapidly settling Ohio country -- would become a breakaway republic.

But he thought there was a solution: He could help create the Potomac Route to the West. The river could become the premier commercial artery for the young republic. It would bind the settlers in the Ohio country to the markets of the Atlantic Seaboard. But without improvements in the river and the creation of a good portage road over the mountains, the centrifugal forces of the Revolution might rip the country apart. There might even be a civil war -- West against East.

Most biographers have focused on Washington's full-time jobs (plantation owner, warrior, president). Yet sometimes we understand a person best when we see what he does in his spare time, when he is not forced by necessity to dash off into battle or settle a political dispute. Washington, given the chance, high-tailed it to the hinterlands. Less than a year after returning from the war, and declaring that he was forever retired to "my own vine and my own fig tree," Washington saddled up and headed west. Washington's detailed diary of his epic 1784 journey to the frontier -- and the annotations and insights provided over the years by historians and archivists of The Papers of George Washington -- is the primary basis of this account. Washington hadn't kept a diary for nearly three years, but when he set out on September 1, 1784, he began scribbling with gusto in his small leather-bound notebooks. He was accompanied on the trip by his nephew, old friend James Craik, Craik's son and several slaves who were unidentified in the diary.