Washington was on the Youghiogany, a branch of the Monongahela, exploring it in hopes that it might prove navigable, when a messenger came to him from his old comrade, the Half-King, who was on the way to join him.  The message was to the effect that the French had marched from their fort, and meant to attack the first English they should meet.  A report came soon after that they were already at the ford of the Youghiogany, eighteen miles distant.  Washington at once repaired to the Great Meadows, a level tract of grass and bushes, bordered by wooded hills, and traversed in one part by a gully, which with a little labor the men turned into an entrenchment, at the same time cutting away the bushes and clearing what the young commander called “a charming field for an encounter.”  Parties were sent out to scour the woods, but they found no enemy.  Two days passed; when, on the morning of the twenty-seventh, Christopher Gist, who had lately made a settlement on the farther side of Laurel Hill, twelve or thirteen miles distant, came to the camp with news that fifty Frenchmen had been at his house towards noon of the day before, and would have destroyed everything but for the intervention of two Indians whom he had left in charge during his absence.  Washington sent seventy-five men to look for the party; but the search was vain, the French having hidden themselves so well as to escape any eye but that of an Indian.  In the evening a runner came from the Half-King, who was encamped with a few warriors some miles distant.  He had sent to tell Washington that he had found the tracks of two men, and traced them towards a dark glen in the forest, where in his belief all the French were lurking.

Washington seems not to have hesitated a moment.  Fearing a stratagem to surprise his camp, he left his main force to guard it, and at ten o’clock set out for the Half-King’s wigwams at the head of forty men.  The night was rainy, and the forest, to use his own words, “as black as pitch.”  “The path,” he continues, “was hardly wide enough for one man; we often lost it, and could not find it again for fifteen or twenty minutes, and we often tumbled over each other in the dark[147].”  Seven of his men were lost in the woods and left behind.  The rest groped their way all night, and reached the Indian camp at sunrise.  A council was held with the Half-King, and he and his warriors agreed to join in striking the French.  Two of them led the way.  The tracks of the two French scouts seen the day before were again found, and, marching in single file, the party pushed through the forest into the rocky hollow where the French were supposed to be concealed.  They were there in fact; and they snatched their guns the moment they saw the English.  Washington gave the word to fire.  A short fight ensued.  Coulon de Jumonville, an ensign in command, was killed, with nine others; twenty-two were captured, and none escaped but a Canadian who had fled at the beginning of the fray.  After it was over, the prisoners told Washington that the party had been sent to bring him a summons from Contrecoeur, the commandant at Fort Duquesne.