Jumonville Glen, 1754: the skirmish that set the world on fire

In the early 1750s Britain and France both wanted the Ohio country, the land between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. From 1753 French soldiers built a chain of forts from Lake Erie south toward the Forks of the Ohio, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet. That winter Virginia's lieutenant governor, Robert Dinwiddie, sent young George Washington to tell the French to leave. They told him they were not obliged to obey and would stay.²

Washington goes west

Dinwiddie then ordered a fort built at the Forks and promoted Washington to lieutenant colonel of the new Virginia Regiment, at the head of its advance force. His orders were to act on the defensive, but if anyone obstructed the work, to take them prisoner or "kill & destroy them". Before he arrived, the French seized the half-built fort at the Forks. Tanaghrisson, a Seneca leader whom the Iroquois Confederacy had appointed to speak for the Mingo, Shawnee and Delaware of the Ohio country, saw the French advance as a threat and urged Washington on.³

By 24 May Washington had reached the Great Meadows, a natural clearing with water and grass for his animals, and made it his base. On the evening of 27 May a messenger from Tanaghrisson brought word that a French party was camped in a ravine a few miles away.⁴

Fifteen minutes in the glen

That stormy night Washington set out with about 40 men. The woods were so dark, the National Park Service says, that the men sometimes spent nearly half an hour finding the trail again. At dawn on 28 May he met Tanaghrisson, and together they closed in on the French camp. The French had posted no sentries. Washington's Virginians took the high ground above the camp, while Tanaghrisson's warriors moved to block its only exit.⁵

Who fired first is not known. A French survivor said the Virginians opened fire without warning; Washington reported that a Frenchman saw his men and fired first. The Virginians fired two volleys, and some French fired back. A few days later Washington wrote that he had heard the bullets whistle, "and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound". The fight lasted about 15 minutes. The French surrendered when they saw that Tanaghrisson's men had cut off their escape.⁶

"Thou art not yet dead, my father"

Among the wounded was the French commander, Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville. He declared that he was an envoy carrying a message that asked the British to leave French territory. The National Park Service confirms that Jumonville had orders to tell the nearest British officer he was trespassing, and also to drive out British traders. Washington doubted it: why, if they were diplomats, had the French hidden in a ravine off the trail for perhaps two days without approaching him?⁷

Then, Isaac Makos of George Washington's Mount Vernon writes for the American Battlefield Trust, Tanaghrisson stepped up to Jumonville, said in French "Thou art not yet dead, my father," and killed him with his tomahawk. By calling the officer father he made him stand for French power over the peoples of the Ohio country, and by killing him he symbolically destroyed it. His warriors then killed and scalped all but one of the other French wounded.⁸

Counting the dead

The figures differ. The National Park Service gives 13 French dead and 21 captured, with one man escaping to Fort Duquesne at the Forks; Washington lost one man killed and two or three wounded. Makos cites Washington's report of one man killed and three wounded on his side and 14 French killed or wounded in the exchange, before the killing of the wounded that followed; 21 prisoners went back to the Great Meadows. Washington sent them on to Virginia and, Makos notes, downplayed the events in his report to Dinwiddie, calling the French spies.⁹

The road to Fort Necessity

Washington knew that the French would come. He built a small stockade at the Great Meadows, which he called Fort Necessity. To avenge Jumonville, the French sent about 600 soldiers and Native allies from Fort Duquesne under Jumonville's elder half brother, Louis Coulon de Villiers, and on 3 July 1754 they attacked Washington's force of 400. One clause of the surrender that Washington signed there admitted the "assassination" of Jumonville. Washington insisted that the translation he had been given said only "death" or "killing", but the French used the word to great effect.¹⁰

The skirmish in the glen and the fight at Fort Necessity are counted as the opening actions of the French and Indian War, which grew into the Seven Years' War across Europe, India and the oceans. A remark attributed to Horace Walpole sums it up: "The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire". The war ended with France losing most of its power in North America, and the taxes Britain then asked of its colonies helped lead to the Revolution in which that young Virginian would lead the Continental Army.¹¹ › Battle of Carillon, 1758