The modern tourist looking upon the massive, picturesque "Mess House" must not forget that "Fort Niagara" was a thing of slow growth. The first work here was undoubtedly the foundation and first story of the Mess House, surrounded by the common picket wall always found around the frontier fort. The first picket wall was falling down by 1739, when it was repaired. At this time Niagara was fast losing its hold on western trade because of the enforcing of the policy of not selling the Indians liquor; however, in 1741, the Governor of New York affirmed that he held the Six Nations only by presents and that Fort Niagara must be captured. In 1745, when the French policy regarding the Indians was changed, Fort Niagara contained only a hundred men and four guns. It is said that the fort had been used to some extent as a State prison; surely few French prisons, at home or abroad, had a more gloomy dungeon than that in Fort Niagara which is shown visitors to-day; the apartment measures six by eighteen feet and ten feet in height, of solid stone with no opening for light or air. The well of the castle was located here, and many a weird story attaches, especially of the headless trunk of the French general that haunted the curbstone moaning over his sorry lot. This dungeon is one of the places named as the scene of imprisonment of the anti-Masonic agitator William Morgan in later days. As the middle of the eighteenth century drew on France and England turned from the European battlefields to America to settle their immemorial quarrel for the possession of the continent. It is interesting to note that the opening of the struggle occurred not in the North or East, as would naturally be expected, but in the West to which Niagara offered "the communication." In 1747 the Ohio Company was formed in Virginia and received its grant of land beyond the Alleghanies from the British King. With the exception of Lederer, whose explorations did not reach westward of Harper's Ferry, and Batts, who had visited the Falls of the Great Kanawha, the English colonies knew little or nothing of the West, save only the fables brought back by Spottswood's _Knights of the Golden Horseshoe_. But the doughty Irish and Scotch-Irish traders had pierced the mountains and made bold to challenge the trade of the French with the western nations. Immediately Celoron was sent from Montreal on the long voyage by way of Niagara to bury his leaden plates on the Ohio to re-establish the brave claim incised on La Salle's plate buried at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1682, which vaunted French possession of all lands drained by waters entering the Gulf of Mexico through the mouth of the Mississippi. Celoron's expedition is interesting because this was the first open advance upon the Ohio Valley by France, leading to the building of a chain of forts westward from the key position, Fort Niagara. Celoron's Journal reads: