Note 7 — Chapter I

"The governors of Canada, who were generally military men, had, for several preceding years, judiciously selected and fortified such situations as would give their nation most influence with the Indians, and most facilitate incursions into the northern English provinces. The command of Lake Champlain had been acquired by erecting a strong fort at Crown Point, and a connected chain of posts was maintained from Quebec up the St. Lawrence and along the Great Lakes. It was now intended to unite these posts with the Mississippi, by taking positions which should enable them to circumscribe, and at the same time annoy, the frontier settlements of the English. The execution of this plan was probably in some degree accelerated by an act of the British government. The year after the conclusion of the war with France, several very influential persons, both in England and Virginia, who associated under the name of the Ohio Company, obtained from the crown a grant for 600,000 acres of land, lying in the country which was claimed by both nations. Several opulent merchants, as well as noblemen and gentlemen, being members of this company, its objects were commercial as well as territorial; and measures were immediately taken to derive all the advantages expected from their grants in both these respects, by establishing houses for carrying on their trade with the Indians. The governor of Canada, who obtained early intelligence of this intrusion, as he deemed it, into the dominions of his Christian majesty, wrote immediately to the governors of New York and Pennsylvania, informing them that the English traders had encroached on the French territory by trading with the Indians, and warning them that, if they did not desist, he should be under the necessity of seizing them wherever they should be found. This threat having been disregarded, it was put in execution by seizing the British traders among the Twightwees,[55] and carrying them as prisoners to a fort on Lake Erie."—Marshall's Life of Washington, vol. i., p. 297.