But the French seized the English trading-house at Venango which they converted into a fort; and Virginia's protest, conveyed by a calm and judicious young man, a surveyor, George Washington, availed not to prevent the French from seizing Captain Trent's hastily erected military post at the forks of the Ohio and constructing there a formidable work, named Fort Duquesne.

Washington, with his expeditionary force sent to garrison Captain Trent's fort, defeated Jumonville and his small force near Great Meadows (May, 1754); but soon after he was forced to surrender Fort Necessity to Coulon de Villiers.
The titanic struggle, fittingly precipitated in the backwoods of the Old Southwest, was now on--a struggle in which the resolute pioneers of these backwoods first seriously measured their strength with the French and their copper-hued allies, and learned to surpass the latter in their own mode of warfare.

The portentous conflict, destined to assure the eastern half of the continent to Great Britain, is a grim, prophetic harbinger of the mighty movement of the next quarter of a century into the twilight zone of the trans-Alleghany territory:.