Even as the French army was building canoes that winter for its advance on the Ohio, Thomas Cresap and William Trent were supervising the construction of an English fort at the forks of the river. They now represented the Governor of Virginia and the King of England, as well as the Ohio Company, all of whom were one and the same as far as the Ohio valley was concerned. In fact Trent, the fur trader in the employ of the Ohio Company, had been commissioned a captain by Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to command the new fort and oppose the French. But when spring and the French came to the Forks of the Ohio, Captain Trent was absent. He said he was looking for recruits; some suspected he was ferrying his beaver to a safer spot. The ensign in command yielded the English fort in the face of overwhelming odds, and the French built an impressive citadel in its place, which they named Fort DuQuesne to honor the Canadian governor of that name. Washington, now Colonel Washington, who was advancing from Virginia with his militia to Trent’s support, was much too late. He was forced to content himself with palisading a defensive position along the road at Great Meadows. There at Fort Necessity, as he called it, he warded off as best he could the large number of French troops who came out to engage him. That summer of 1754 Washington surrendered. When he led his militiamen back over the Alleghenies, the Frenchmen had succeeded in their purpose. The English were out of the Ohio valley. However, the American phase of the Seven Years’ War had commenced--two years before it was officially declared in Europe. The critical contest known on this continent as the French and Indian War was under way, and the very next year General Edward Braddock arrived with his British regulars to direct the campaign. The strategic plan decided upon encompassed a four-fold attack upon the French at DuQuesne, Crown Point, Niagara, and in Nova Scotia. General Braddock himself assumed the DuQuesne assignment, the most important immediate objective. But he failed on this mission, his abortive attempt to reach the Forks of the Ohio ending in the disastrous rout of his troops and his own death. It was not until 1758 that General John Forbes forced the evacuation of the fort at the Forks of the Ohio. The French then abandoned the entire valley. Fort DuQuesne became Fort Pitt and the English were in control of the Ohio River. The war was savagely fought out on all fronts in America. Other French citadels fell--Louisburg, Frontenac, Niagara, Ticonderoga, and Crown Point. Eventually, Quebec and Montreal, those ancient fortresses on the St. Lawrence River, capitulated to the British. Then, in 1763, by the Treaty of Paris, France ceded Canada and all her territory east of the Mississippi River to Great Britain, except for one small plot encompassing New Orleans. Spain likewise ceded Florida.