George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

[94] Indians was excited. ‘Where,’ said the deputy of

chap. IV.} 1752.

the Delaware chiefs, ‘where lie the lands of the Indians? The French claim all on one side of the river, and the English on the other.’

Virginia, under the treaty of Lancaster, of 1744, assumed the right to appropriate to her jurisdiction all the lands as far west as the Mississippi. In May, 1752, her commissioners met chiefs of the Mingoes, Shawnees and Ohio Indians, at Logstown. It was pretended¹ that chiefs of the Six Nations were present; but at a general meeting at Onondaga, they had resolved that it did not suit their customs ‘to treat of affairs in the woods and weeds.’² ‘We never understood,’ said the Half-King, ‘that the lands sold in 1744, were to extend farther to the sunsetting than the hill on the other side the Alleghany Hill. We now see and know that the French design to cheat us out of our lands. They plan nothing but mischief, for they have struck our friends, the Miamis; we therefore desire our brothers of Virginia may build a strong house at the fork of Monongahela.’

The permission to build a fort at the junction of the two rivers that form the Ohio, was due to the alarm awakened by the annually increasing power of France, which already ruled Lake Ontario with armed vessels, held Lake Erie by a fort at Niagara, and would suffer no Western tribe to form alliances but with themselves. The English were to be excluded from the valley of the Miamis; and in pursuance of that resolve, on the morning of the summer solstice, two Frenchmen, with two hundred and forty French