Memorial History of the City of Philadelphia, from Its First Settlement to Year 1895 Volume 1; Narrative and critical history, 1681-1895 - Howard Malcolm Jenkins, Paperback

• Release Date   5/21/2012
• ISBN-13   9781236380173 | 978-1-236-38017-3
• ISBN   1236380177 | 1-236-38017-7
• Format   Paperback
• Author(s)   Howard Malcolm Jenkins
• This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 Excerpt: ...east, or down the River Delaware. The Platform by being uncovered, appears much decayed and out of order. There are upwards of Fifty Guns lying about there, the carriages entirely ruined. The bores of some of the largest Guns are 7 or 8 inches in Diameter. but there is only Twenty-five Port. The C hannel seems there to lie on the further side of the River, Bo that it is imagined a ship of any Burthen cannot come within a mile of the Fort." (Pennu. Mag., XVII., 268.) posts. Two of these were fixed in April, 1753--Fort Presqu'isle, where Erie now stands, and Fort Le Boeuf, a few miles south, on French Creek. These forts commanded the portage between Lake Erie and the heads of the Ohio, for French Creek was then a stream sufficient to float bateaux in which soldiers and even small cannon could ba carried, and it empties into the Allegheny, one of the two great branches of the Ohio. At its junction with the Allegheny--now Franklin, in Venango county--a trading-house was seized, and converted into a military post, known as Fort Venango. It was several months later, being in the Autumn of 1753, that Major George Washington, now a man of twenty-two, sent by Dinwiddie, the governor of Virginia, rode up from Alexandria into western Pennsylvania, to learn the intentions of the French. It was nearly the middle of December when he reached, through rain and slush, the fort at Le Bceuf. When he returned, a little later--crossing the Ohio on the ice, and nearly perishing--it was from his report that the English derived full knowledge of the French ojx'rations, and it was a company of men sent by Dinwiddie, in the spring following, who were at work building a fort at the forks of the Ohio, the most important strategic point of western Pennsylvania, when on the 17th of...