The route from Virginia to the Ohio Valley, finally made historic by the English General Braddock, was by far the most difficult of all the ways by which the English could meet the French. The Potomac was navigable for small boats at favorable seasons for varying distances; but beyond the mountains the first water reached, the Youghiogheny, was useless for military purposes, as Washington discovered during the march of the Virginia Regiment, 1754. The route had, however, been marked out under the direction of Captain Thomas Cresap, for the Ohio Company, and was, at the time of Washington's expedition, the most accessible passageway from Virginia to the "Forks of the Ohio." The only other Virginian thoroughfare westward brought the traveller around into the valley of the Great Kanawha which empties into the Ohio two hundred odd miles below the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. It was over this slight trail by Wills Creek, Great Meadows, and the Forks of the Ohio that Washington had gone in 1753 to the French forts on French Creek; and it was this path that the same undaunted youth widened, the year after, in order to haul his swivels westward with the vanguard of Colonel Fry's army which was to drive the French from the Ohio. Washington's Road--as Nemacolin's Path should, in all conscience, be known--was widened to the summit of Mount Braddock. From Mount Braddock Washington's little force retraced their steps over the road they had built in the face of the larger French army sent against them until they were driven to bay in their little fortified camp, Fort Necessity, in Great Meadows, where the capitulation took place after an all-day's battle. Marching out with the honors of war, the remnant of this first English army crawled painfully back to Wills Creek. All this took place in the summer of 1754. [Illustration: ENGLISH AND FRENCH ROUTES TO THE OHIO (1756) [_From the original in the British Museum_]] The inglorious campaign ending thus in dismay was of considerably more moment than its dejected survivors could possibly have imagined. Small as were the numbers of contestants on both sides, and distant though the scene of conflict might have been, the peace between England and France was at this moment poised too delicately not to be disturbed by even the faintest roll of musketry in the distant unknown Alleghenies.