The French authorities, it turned out, were, as usual, the first to act. In 1752 the Marquis Duquesne became governor of Canada, an energetic soldier in his prime; and it was he who took the first decisive step. In the spring of 1753 he despatched a force to Presque Isle, on the southern shore of Lake Erie, built a log fort there, and thence cut a portage for his boats southward a little way through the forest to a creek (French Creek the English called it afterwards) whose waters, when at flood, would carry his boats to the Alleghany, and by that open stream to the Ohio. It was the short and straight way from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi and the Gulf. At the creek’s head he placed another log fort (Le Bœuf), and upon the Alleghany a rude outpost. The same year that saw the Marquis Duquesne made governor of Canada saw Robert Dinwiddie come out as governor of Virginia, and no one was likelier than he to mark and comprehend the situation on the border. Mr. Dinwiddie had been bred in a counting house, for he was the son of a well-to-do merchant of Glasgow; but business had long since become for him a matter of government. He had gone in his prime to be collector of customs in Bermuda; and after serving in that post for eleven years he had been made surveyor general of customs in the southern ports of America,—a post in which he served most acceptably for another ten years. For twenty years he had shown singular zeal and capacity in difficult, and, for many men, demoralizing, matters of administration. He had lived in Virginia when surveyor general of customs. During the two years which immediately preceded his appointment to the governorship of the Old Dominion he had engaged in business on his own account in London, and had become by purchase one of the twenty stockholders of the Ohio Land Company. He came to his new office, therefore, acquainted in more than one way with the leading men of the colony,—especially with Mr. Augustine Washington, now the Ohio Company’s president, and the little group of influential gentlemen,—Lees, Fairfaxes, and the rest,—often to be found gathered at Mount Vernon. He came, therefore, with his eyes on the western lands where the company and his government were alike bound to see to it that the French were checked. [Illustration: FACSIMILE OF THE NEW YORK WEEKLY _JOURNAL_]