At one place (the place where the Loups prayed for a smith) they found a young Englishman with a few dozen workmen building a stockade, but they sent him back beyond the mountains over which he had come and built upon its site Fort Duquesne--the defense of the mountain gate to the great valley--here with a few hundred men on the edge of a hostile wilderness to make beginning of that mighty struggle which was to end, as we know, on the river by which Cartier and Champlain had made their way into the continent. It is a fact, remarkable to us now, that the first to bring a challenge from behind the mountains to that brave and isolate garrison sitting in Fort Duquesne at the junction of the water paths, was Washington ("Sir Washington," as one chronicler has written it), not Washington the American but Washington the English subject, major in the colonial militia, envoy of an English governor of Virginia, Dinwiddie, who, having acquired a controlling interest in the Ohio Company, became especially active in planning to seat a hundred families on that transmontane estate of a half-million acres and so to win title to it. "So complicated [were] the political interests of [that] time that a shot fired in America [was] the signal for setting all Europe together by the ears," wrote Voltaire, [Footnote: Voltaire, "The French in America" in his "Short Studies in English and American Subjects," p. 249.] and "it was not a cannon-shot" that gave the signal but, as Parkman said, "a volley from the hunting pieces of a few backwoodsmen, commanded by a Virginia youth, George Washington." [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," 1:3.] We must stop for a moment to look at this lithe young English colonist, twenty-one years of age, standing on the nearest edge of the French explorations and claims and the farthest verge of English adventure, on the watershed twenty miles from Lake Erie, and requesting, in the name of Governor Dinwiddie and of the shade of John Cabot, the peaceable departure of those French pioneers and soldiers, who, as the letter which the young colonel bore stated, were "erecting fortresses and making settlements upon the the river [Ohio] so notoriously known to be the property of the Crown of Great Britain."