The Shenandoah Valley

When I hear "Shenandoah Valley" my mind sees bountiful fields of crops, tall trees green in the summer and sporting fabulous colors in the fall.  I see isolated communities - isolated from the hustle and bustle of the east coast mega-cities and the exposed, windy central plains of the west.  To sum it up, it all seems peaceful but productive.

But apparently it is a valley that had to be tamed - and George Washington played a part in that taming.  George grew into manhood moving through the western part of the colony of Virginia, first as a surveyor (You can go to one of our earlier posts on "The Natural Bridge" and see George's initials carved into the arch) and later as a part of His Majesty's Virginia Militia.

Now, here's something you won't hear elsewhere, and I credit it to this website from ancestry.com:  http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/the-fort-loudon-skeletons.htm if you want to check it out.  According to ancestry.com, (and what reason would they have to not tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth?) according to ancestry.com, in 1754, George set off the French and Indian (that's the French and Indians against the colonists) War and the Seven Years War in Europe.  (Wait a minute.  How could something George do in western colonial Virginia set off a war in Europe??)  And it was due to "incompetent decisions" George made.  Now, I heard that he had, like all of us, a learning curve that he had to overcome as a young military man, but to read that website it's like ol' George single-handedly caused the "first global war."  This will take a LOT more research!  Then it will all boil down to "believe it or not."

So, in 1754, the farms in western Virginia, the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes regions were pretty isolated.  The Indians weren't blind, though.  They could see more and more and more Europeans moving in and settling down, building homes and growing crops.  So, their warriors began attacking those homes in the Shenandoah Valley.  Well, the Indians along with those pesky Frenchmen attacked settlers 

Now, there's been some revisionist history going on for the last thirty or forty (or fifty) years in America.  Folks have tried to make us believe that all American Indians were kumbaya kinda guys.  Truth is no where near that - especially in the east.  During the 1754 conflict in the Shenandoah Valley, what the Indians did makes their link to human sacrifice in the not too distant past seem to be a fact.  If there were Frenchmen with the Indian war parties, all adult European males were killed, but the Frenchmen drew the line there.  They wouldn't abide the murder of women and children.  However, if it was just Native Americans, there were no survivors.  Adult captives were burned at the stake - for real, not Hollywood style - and toddlers were hung from tree limbs then shot full of arrows.  Sounds like human sacrifice to me!

So, in 1755, George Washington proposed a fort be built at the north end of the Shenandoah at Winchester.  England's North American commander agreed, and so the fort was given his name, Fort Loudon.  It was constructed much like Fort William Henry in upstate New York (Ft. Henry, of "Last of the Mohicans" Leatherstocking Saga fame.)  That's important only because I love the Leatherstocking Saga's.

And that's about all this website says about George's responsibility for causing the first global war.  H-E-L-L-O!!  It's un-American of you to just stop there!!

Fine.  I'll keep researching on my own.  Google a lil' of this and Google a lil' of that - and the long and the short of it is, yes, George was in charge of the Virginia militia during the first battle of the French and Indian War - which he won.  And, yes, he lost a couple of the next engagements.  But, if he was such a bad officer with a bad learning curve, why did the British keep raising his rank and putting him in charge??  Is there a bit more revisionist history going on here?  And why would our Founding Fathers put him in charge of defeating the British in 1776?  The totality of facts from a myriad of sources tells me George is exactly what I always thought he was: a man (not a god), and a pretty good man was he!

So, if I'm not totally believing that original website about George, why am I believing them when they say this:  when George's men began construction on Fort Loudon in 1754, they almost immediately uncovered Native American skeletons - measuring 7 feet tall!!  Most Indians were more in the 5 foot 5 range.  George wrote about them to the powers that be back in colonial Williamsburg, Virginia.   Where did these big guys come from?  Don't know.  But I will say that, over the years of my interest in history, I've heard many stories about unusually tall Native Americans - and red-headed Native Americans and Nordic-looking Native Americans.  I think I'll just file this new information away in my lil' brain and maybe someday all the pieces will come together to create indisputable facts.  Until then I will just keep on combing through history and lovin' every minute of it!