One of the most curious circle of friends was that composed of Indians.  After his mission among them in 1753, Washington wrote to a tribe and signed himself “your friend and brother.”  In a less general sense he requested an Indian agent to “recommend me kindly to Mononcatoocha and others; tell them how happy it would make Conotocarius to have an opportunity of taking them by the hand.”  A little later he had this pleasure, and he wrote the governor, “the Indians are all around teasing and perplexing me for one thing or another, so that I scarce know what I write.”  When Washington left the frontier this intercourse ceased, but he was not forgotten, for in descending the Ohio in his Western trip of 1770 a hunting party was met, and “in the person of Kiashuto I found an old acquaintance, he being one of the Indians that went [with me] to the French in 1753.  He expressed satisfaction at seeing me, and treated us with great kindness, giving us a quarter of very fine buffalo.  He insisted upon our spending that night with him, and, in order to retard us as little as possible moved his camp down the river.”

With his appointment to the Virginia regiment came military friends.  From the earliest of these—­Van Braam, who had served under Lawrence Washington in the Carthagena expedition of 1742, and who had come to live at Mount Vernon—­Washington had previously taken lessons in fencing, and when appointed the bearer of a letter to the French commander on the Ohio he took Van Braam with him as interpreter.  A little later, on receiving his majority, Washington appointed Van Braam his recruiting lieutenant, and recommended him to the governor for a captain’s commission on the grounds that he was “an experienced good officer.”  To Van Braam fell the duty of translating the capitulation to the French at Fort Necessity, and to his reading was laid the blunder by which Washington signed a statement acknowledging himself as an “assassin.”  Inconsequence he became the scapegoat of the expedition, was charged by the governor with being a “poltroon” and traitor, and was omitted from the Assembly’s vote of thanks and extra pay to the regiment.  But Washington stood by him, and when himself burgess succeeded in getting this latter vote rescinded.

Another friend of the same period was the Chevalier Peyroney, whom Washington first made an ensign, and then urged the governor to advance him, promising that if the governor “should be pleased to indulge me in this request, I shall look upon it in a very particular light.”  Peyroney was badly wounded at Fort Necessity and was furloughed, during which he wrote his commander, “I have made my particular Business to tray if any had some Bad intention against you here Below; But thank God I meet allowais with a good wish for you from evry Mouth each one entertining such Caracter of you as I have the honour to do myself.”  He served again in the Braddock march, and in that fiasco, Washington wrote, “Captain Peyroney and all his officers down to a corporal, was killed.”