This site--today Pittsburgh--if occupied and held by either nation would give that nation the command of the Ohio.

Occupied it was for a brief hour by a small party of Virginians, under Captain William Trent; but no sooner had they erected on the spot a crude fort than the French descended upon them.

What happened then all the world knows: how the French built on the captured site their great Fort Duquesne; how George Washington with an armed force, sent by Dinwiddie to recapture the place, encountered French and Indians at Great Meadows and built Fort Necessity, which he was compelled to surrender; how in the next year (1755) General Braddock arrived from across the sea and set out to take Fort Duquesne, only to meet on the way the disaster called "Braddock's Defeat"; and how, before another year had passed, the Seven Years' War was raging in Europe, and England was allied with the enemies of France.
>From the midst of the debacle of Braddock's defeat rises the figure of the young Washington.

Twenty-three he was then, tall and spare and hardbodied from a life spent largely in the open.

When Braddock fell, this Washington appeared.