The Marquis of Duquesne, who had succeeded Galissoniere as governor, highly praised Langlade for the enterprise, and recommended him to the minister at home for reward.  This bold enterprise further shook the alliance of the Indians with the English, for it seemed to them that the French were enterprising and energetic, while the English were slothful and cowardly, and neglected to keep their agreements.  The French continued to build forts, and Dinwiddie, governor of Virginia, sent George Washington to protest, in his name, against their building forts on land notoriously belonging to the English crown.

Washington performed the long and toilsome journey through the forests at no slight risks, and delivered his message at the forts, but nothing came of it.  The governor of Virginia, seeing the approaching danger, made the greatest efforts to induce the other colonies to join in common action; but North Carolina, alone, answered the appeal, and gave money enough to raise three or four hundred men.  Two independent companies maintained by England in New York, and one in South Carolina, received orders to march to Virginia.  The governor had raised, with great difficulty, three hundred men.  They were called the Virginia Regiment.  An English gentleman named Joshua Fry was appointed the colonel, and Washington their major.

Fry was at Alexandria, on the Potomac, with half the regiment.  Washington, with the other half, had pushed forward to the storehouse at Wills Creek, which was to form the base of operations.  Besides these, Captain Trent, with a band of backwoodsmen, had crossed the mountain to build a fort at the forks of the Ohio, where Pittsburgh now stands.

Trent had gone back to Wills Creek, leaving Ensign Ward, with forty men, at work upon the fort, when, on the 17th of April, a swarm of canoes came down the Allegheny, with over five hundred Frenchmen, who planted cannon against the unfinished stockade, and summoned the ensign to surrender.  He had no recourse but to submit, and was allowed to depart, with his men, across the mountains.

The French at once set to, to build a strong fort, which they named Fort Duquesne.  While the governor of Virginia had been toiling, in vain, to get the colonists to move, the French had acted promptly, and the erection of their new fort at once covered their line of communication to the west, barred the advance of the English down the Ohio valley, and secured the allegiance of all the wavering Indian tribes.

Although war had not yet been declared between England and France, the colonists, after this seizure, by French soldiers, of a fort over which the English flag was flying, henceforth acted as if the two powers were at war.  Washington moved forward from Wills Creek with his hundred and fifty men, and surprised a French force which had gone out scouting.  Several of the French were killed, and the commander of Fort Duquesne sent despatches to France to say that he had sent this party out with a communication to Washington, and that they had been treacherously assassinated.