That was almost the last exploit of Lord Dunmore. He kept up his plundering raids a little longer, and once sailed up the Potomac to Mount Vernon, with the fancy that he might find and capture Washington. But soon after that he sailed away with his plunder and about one thousand slaves whom he had taken from the plantations, and Virginia was well rid of her last royal governor. A patriot governor soon followed, Patrick Henry being chosen, and occupying the very mansion at Williamsburg from which Dunmore had proclaimed him a traitor. _THE FATAL EXPEDITION OF COLONEL ROGERS._ One of the great needs of the Americans in the war of the Revolution was ammunition. Gunpowder and cannon-balls were hard to get and easy to get rid of, being fired away with the utmost generosity whenever the armies came together, and sought for with the utmost solicitude when the armies were apart. The patriots made what they could and bought what they could, and on one occasion sent as far as New Orleans, on the lower Mississippi, to buy some ammunition which the Spaniards were willing to sell. But it was one thing to buy this much needed material and another thing to get it where it was needed. In those days it was a long journey to New Orleans and back. Yet the only way to obtain the ammunition was to send for it, and a valiant man, named Colonel David Rogers, a native of Virginia or Maryland, was chosen to go and bring it. His expedition was so full of adventure, and ended in such a tragic way, that it seems well worth telling about. It was from the Old Red Stone Fort on the Monongahela River, one of the two streams that make up the Ohio, that the expedition was to start, and here Colonel Rogers found the boats and men waiting for him at the end of his ride across the hill country. There were forty men in the party, and embarking with these, Rogers soon floated down past Fort Pitt and entered the Ohio, prepared for a journey of some thousands of miles in length. It was in the summer of the year 1778 that these bold men set out on a perilous journey from which few of them were to return. But what might come troubled them little. The weather was pleasant, the trees along the stream were charming in their summer foliage, and their hearts were full of hope and joy as they floated and rowed down the "Beautiful River," as it had been named by the Indians and the French. They needed, indeed, to be alert and watchful, for they knew well that hundreds of hostile savages dwelt in the forest depths on both sides of the stream, eager for blood and scalps. But the rough frontiersmen had little fear of the Indians, with the water beneath them and their good rifles beside them, and they sang their border songs and chatted in jovial tones as they went steadily onward, eating and sleeping in the boats, for it was nowhere safe to land. In this way they reached the mouth of the Ohio in safety and turned their prows into the broader current of the Mississippi.