or less active to procure it; but as most of them had some standing dispute with their assemblies, they could get nothing except on terms with which they would not, and sometimes could not, comply.  As the lands invaded by the French belonged to one of the two rival claimants, Virginia and Pennsylvania, the other colonies had no mind to vote money to defend them.  Pennsylvania herself refused to move.  Hamilton, her governor, could do nothing against the placid obstinacy of the Quaker non-combatants and the stolid obstinacy of the German farmers who chiefly made up his Assembly.  North Carolina alone answered the appeal, and gave money enough to raise three or four hundred men.  Two independent companies maintained by the King in New York, and one in South Carolina, had received orders from England to march to the scene of action; and in these, with the scanty levies of his own and the adjacent province, lay Dinwiddie’s only hope.  With men abundant and willing, there were no means to put them into the field, and no commander whom they would all obey.

From the brick house at Williamsburg pompously called the Governor’s Palace, Dinwiddie despatched letters, orders, couriers, to hasten the tardy reinforcements of North Carolina and New York, and push on the raw soldiers of the Old Dominion, who now numbered three hundred men.  They were called the Virginia regiment; and Joshua Fry, an English gentleman, bred at Oxford, was made their colonel, with Washington as next in command.  Fry was at Alexandria with half the so-called regiment, trying to get it into marching order; Washington, with the other half, had pushed forward to the Ohio Company’s storehouse at Wills Creek, which was to form a base of operations.  His men were poor whites, brave, but hard to discipline; without tents, ill armed, and ragged as Falstaff’s recruits.  Besides these, a band of backwoodsmen under Captain Trent had crossed the mountains in February to build a fort at the forks of the Ohio, where Pittsburg now stands,—­a spot which Washington had examined when on his way to Fort Le Boeuf, and which he had reported as the best for the purpose.  The hope was that Trent would fortify himself before the arrival of the French, and that Washington and Fry would join him in time to secure the position.  Trent had begun the fort; but for some unexplained reason had gone back to Wills Creek leaving Ensign Ward with forty men at work upon it.  Their labors were suddenly interrupted.  On the seventeenth of April a swarm of bateaux and canoes came down the Alleghany, bringing, according to Ward, more than a thousand Frenchmen, though in reality not much above five hundred, who landed, planted cannon against the incipient stockade, and summoned the ensign to surrender, on pain of what might ensue.[145] He complied, and was allowed to depart with his men.  Retracing his steps over the mountains, he reported his mishap to Washington; while the French demolished his unfinished fort, began a much larger and better one, and named it Fort Duquesne.