The travellers were destined to encounter new hardships in the new mode of exploring a wilderness. "Several times," writes the chief in his report, "we had like to have been dashed against rocks; and many times we were obliged, all hands, to get out, and remain in the water half an hour or more, getting over the shoals." Pleasant work for December! "At one place the ice had lodged, and made it impassable by water; we were therefore obliged to carry our canoe a quarter of a mile over. We did not reach Venango till the 22d, where we met with our horses."

The horses being nearly useless, from hard work and poor feeding, the cold increasing every day and the roads being blocked up by a heavy snow, Washington, anxious to get back and make his report to the governor, resolved upon attempting to perform the remainder of the journey on foot, accompanied only by Mr. Gist, the most experienced of the party, and leaving the baggage and effects in charge of Mr. Van Braam. With gun in hand, and the necessary papers and provisions in a pack strapped on his back, he set out, with a single companion, to thread the trackless forest, on the 26th of December, not without some misgivings, as we may well believe. On the second day the two travellers encountered a party of Indians in league with the French, evidently lying in wait for them. One of the savages fired at them, not fifteen paces off, and missed; but instead of returning the fire, which might have brought the whole pack upon them, they simply

1753.]

ADVENTURE OF THE RAFT.

131

took the fellow into custody, disarmed him, and kept him close till nine o'clock in the evening; then let him go, and, after making a fire to deceive the enemy, walked all night to get the start of whoever might attempt to follow. The next day they walked on until dark, and reached the river about two miles above the Fork of the Ohio, the ice driving down in great quantities.

Here it was that the incident of the whirling raft occurred, which had so nearly changed the fortunes of our first struggle for independence, if not the whole destiny of our country for an age or two at least. The journalist states the occurrence thus:

"There was no way for getting over but on a raft, which we set about with one poor hatchet, and finished just after sunsetting. This was one whole day's work. We next got it launched, then went on board of it and set off; but before we were half way over, we were jammed in the ice in such a manner that we expected every moment our raft to sink and ourselves to perish. I put out my setting pole to try to stop the raft, that the ice might pass by, when the rapidity of the stream threw it with such violence against the pole, that it jerked me out into ten feet water, but I fortunately saved myself by catching hold of one of the raft logs. Notwithstanding all our efforts, we could not get to either shore, but were obliged, as we were near an island, to quit our raft and make to it. The cold was so extremely severe that Mr. Gist had all his fingers and some of his toes frozen, and the water shut up so hard

that we found no difficulty in getting off the island on the ice in the morning."

We have seen several picturings of the scene on the raft, and one of Washington struggling in the icy water, but we should like to see one that would express the condition of the two half-frozen travellers on the island, through that terrible night, without tent or fire, and wrapped in the stiff, frozen clothes with which one of them, at least, must have come on shore. Not a word is said of this in the journal; of the horrors of cold, fatigue and hunger all at once; the long hours till morning, the reasonable dread of such savage dangers as had already been encountered. Well may Washington say this travel of eleven weeks had been "as fatiguing a journey as it is possible to conceive;" and he adds, "from the 1st day of December to the 15th, there was but one day on which it did not snow or rain incessantly; and throughout the whole journey we met with nothing but one continued series of cold, wet weather, which occasioned very uncomfortable lodgings, especially after we had quitted our tent, which was some screen from the inclemency of it."

Uncomfortable lodgings!

One amusing incident forms but a slender counterbalance to all this toil and suffering, yet we will quote it, to lighten our picture a little.

There was a certain Indian princess, called by the English settlers Queen Aliquippa, whose royal wigwam was placed somewhere near the route of the youthful