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Updated: May 21, 2025
Unfortunately the night proved to be a very cold one, and poor Gist's feet and hands were frozen before morning. Washington got no frost-bites, but his sufferings must have been great. During the night that part of the stream which lay between the island and the shore that Washington wished to reach froze over, and in the morning the travellers were able to renew their journey.
It was signed by about one-half the Senators and Representatives of the States of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas. It precedes every ordinance of secession, and is the "official" beginning of the subsequent "Confederate States," just as Governor Gist's October circular was the "official" beginning of South Carolina secession.
Captain de Villiers, a brother-in-law of Jumonville, had actually sallied forth from Fort Duquesne at the head of upwards of five hundred French, and several hundred Indians, eager to avenge the death of his relative. Arriving about dawn of day at Gist's plantation, he surrounded the works which Washington had hastily thrown up there, and fired into them.
Of George Gist's married life we have little recorded. It was of very short duration. He converted his merchandise into furs, and did not make more than one or two trips. With him it had merely been cheap protection and board. We might denounce him as a low adventurer if we did not remember that he was the father of one of the most remarkable men who ever appeared on the continent.
Rain fell all day. The raw earth of the embankment was turned to soft mud, and the men in the ditch of the outwork stood to the knee in water. The swivels brought back from the camp at Gist's farm were mounted on the rampart; but the gunners were so ill protected that the pieces were almost silenced by the French musketry. The fight lasted nine hours.
The orders which he brought were executed during the night, and he was in the saddle early in the morning accompanying the convoy of supplies. At Gist's plantation, about thirteen miles off, he met Gage and his scanty force escorting Braddock and his wounded officers. Captain Stewart and a sad remnant of the Virginia light horse still accompanied the general as his guard.
With the close of the Revolution, came a rush of travel down the great river. With the latter, this sketch has naught to do. By the close of the Revolution, Pittsburg in Gist's day, but a squalid Indian village, and a fording-place was still only "a distant out-post, merely a foothold in the Far West."
He had been at Gist's new settlement beyond Laurel Hill, and was prowling about the country with four soldiers at his heels on a pretended hunt after deserters. Washington suspected him to be on a reconnoitering expedition. It was reported, moreover, that the French were lavishing presents on the Indians about the lower part of the river, to draw them to their standard.
Colonel Cabell was so kind as to send me a return of the Continental regiments, commanded by Lord Sterling, of the first and second Virginia State regiments, and of Colonel Gist's regiment. Besides these are the following, viz.
In trying to pole this across the swift current, Washington was thrown into the water and was nearly drowned, but he managed to get on the raft again and they reached an island, where they spent the night. It was so intensely cold that Gist's hands and feet were frozen. The next morning, they got ashore on the chunks of ice and by suppertime were in the warm house of a trader named Frazier.
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