Young George Washington and the French and Indian War, 1753-1758
- ISBN-10
- 020802509X
- ISBN-13
- 9780208025098
- Category
- Juvenile Nonfiction / History / General
- Pages
- 121
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2002
- Publisher
- Linnet Books
- Author
- Robert M. McClung
Description
George Washington ambushes the French and becomes an "assassin": The element of surprise was gone. Washington could not tell whether his other column and the Indian forces were in place, but he saw no reason to delay. He gave his men the order to fire. A volley of shots rang out, and he saw some of the French soldiers fall ... Surrendering, they flung down their muskets ... Their leader, thirty-five-year-old Ensign Joseph Coulon, Sieur de Jumonville, lay wounded on the ground. As Washington stepped forward to accept the surrender, Jumonville proclaimed his party's peaceful intent. The French had come, he said, only to warn the British to leave the territory. He had a letter that would make this clear. At the same time, the defeated and defenseless French soldiers were pleading for protection from the Indians. Washington assured them that they would be safe, but then retired a short distance to have his own interpreter go over the words of the paper. While he was preoccupied, the Half-King and his warriors swiftly moved in on the wounded and dead and began killing and scalping them, Jumonville included. The Father of His Country was not always that stellar commander and stern first president who gazes serenely from the famous portraits we have of him. George Washington was once, in fact, a proud, ambitious, and sometimes foolhardy young man whose brashness triggered a major war between the superpowers of his time. Using Washington's diaries as a source, this book tells the story of George's uneven beginning steps into greatness. With French and British facing off for control of North America, the twenty-one-year-old Virginian took on military responsibilities far beyond his ability. Sent to warn the French to get out of the Ohio Valley, he wound up later ambushing them in peacetime and allowing his Indian allies to murder their wounded leader. His forces, holed up in the badly-situated Fort Necessity he had constructed, were almost wiped out in return and Washington was branded as an "assassin."
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