It was on the borders of Virginia this time that the first act of the drama was to be cast. The French determined both to shorten and to close their lines of occupation and defence from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi and the Gulf. They knew that they could do this only by taking possession of the valley of the Ohio; and the plan was no sooner formed than it was attempted. And yet to do this was to come closer than ever to the English and to act under their very eyes. A few German families had made their way far to the westward in Pennsylvania, and hundreds of the indomitable Scots-Irish had been crowding in there for now quite twenty years, passing on, many of them, to the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah below, and pressing everywhere closer and closer to the passes which led down but a little way beyond into the valleys of the Alleghany, the Monongahela, and the Ohio. These men, at the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia, were sure to observe what was going forward in front of them, and to understand what they saw. Traders crossed those mountains now by the score from the English settlements,—three hundred in a year, it was said. They knew the waters that ran to the Ohio quite as well as any Frenchman did. Their canoes had followed the turnings of the broad Ohio itself, and had found it a highway to the spreading Mississippi, where French boats floated slowly down from the country of the Illinois, carrying their cargoes of meat, grain, tobacco, tallow, hides, lead, and oil to the settlements on the Gulf. In 1748, the year of the last peace, certain leading gentlemen in Virginia had organized an Ohio Land Company,—among the rest Mr. Augustus Washington, who had served with Vernon and Wentworth at Cartagena and had lost his health in the fatal service. He had named his estate by the Potomac, his home of retirement, Mount Vernon, as his tribute of admiration to the gallant sailor he had learned to love during those fiery days in the South. In 1750 the English government had granted to the Company six hundred thousand acres of land on the coveted river. Virginian officials themselves had not scrupled meanwhile also to issue grants and titles to land beyond the mountains. The English claim to the Ohio country was unhesitating and comprehensive. The English had seized French traders there as unlicensed intruders, and the French in their turn had seized and expelled Englishmen who trafficked there. French and English matched their wits very shrewdly to get and keep the too fickle friendship of the Indians, and so make sure of their trade and their peace with them; and the Indians got what they could from them both. It was a sharp game for a great advantage, and the governments of the two peoples could not long refrain from taking a hand in it.