While Celoron was warning English traders from the Ohio, a plan was on foot in Virginia for a new invasion of the French domain.  An association was formed to settle the Ohio country; and a grant of five hundred thousand acres was procured from the King, on condition that a hundred families should be established upon it within seven years, a fort built, and a garrison maintained.  The Ohio Company numbered among its members some of the chief men of Virginia, including two brothers of Washington; and it had also a London partner, one Hanbury, a person of influence, who acted as its agent in England.  In the year after the expedition of Celoron, its governing committee sent the trader Christopher Gist to explore the country and select land.  It must be “good level land,” wrote the Committee; “we had rather go quite down to the Mississippi than take mean, broken land."[13] In November Gist reached Logstown, the Chiningue of Celeron, where he found what he calls a “parcel of reprobate Indian traders.”  Those whom he so stigmatizes were Pennsylvanians, chiefly Scotch-Irish, between whom and the traders from Virginia there was great jealousy.  Gist was told that he “should never go home safe.”  He declared himself the bearer of a message from the King.  This imposed respect, and he was allowed to proceed.  At the Wyandot village of Muskingum he found the trader George Croghan, sent to the Indians by the Governor of Pennsylvania, to renew the chain of friendship.[14] “Croghan,” he says, “is a mere idol among his countrymen, the Irish traders;” yet they met amicably, and the Pennsylvanian had with him a companion, Andrew Montour, the interpreter, who proved of great service to Gist.  As Montour was a conspicuous person in his time, and a type of his class, he merits a passing notice.  He was the reputed grandson of a French governor and an Indian squaw.  His half-breed mother, Catharine Montour, was a native of Canada, whence she was carried off by the Iroquois, and adopted by them.  She lived in a village at the head of Seneca Lake, and still held the belief, inculcated by the guides of her youth, that Christ was a Frenchman crucified by the English.[15] Her son Andrew is thus described by the Moravian Zinzendorf, who knew him:  “His face is like that of a European, but marked with a broad Indian ring of bear’s-grease and paint drawn completely round it.  He wears a coat of fine cloth of cinnamon color, a black necktie with silver spangles, a red satin waistcoat, trousers over which hangs his shirt, shoes and stockings, a hat, and brass ornaments, something like the handle of a basket, suspended from his ears."[16] He was an excellent interpreter, and held in high account by his Indian kinsmen.

[Footnote 13:  Instructions to Gist, in appendix to Pownall, Topographical Description of North America.]

[Footnote 14:  Mr. Croghan’s Transactions with the Indians, in N.Y.  Col.  Docs., VII. 267; Croghan to Hamilton, 16 Dec. 1750.]