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Welcome to the pilot episode of Chainsaw History, where Jamie Chambers and his sister Bambi Chambers swear their way through America's checkered past! In this episode, Jamie dives into his genealogy adventure, uncovering the gripping and tragic story of their ancestor, David Boyd, who was captured by Native Americans in the mid-1700s. This tragic tale leads us into the brutal realities of colonial America, the French and Indian War, and George Washington's early military career. From David Boyd's harrowing experience to the pivotal Battle of Jumonville Glen, you'll find history relatable, funny, and sometimes shockingly brutal.

I don't even know how she can cope with that it's like how do you get shingles in your

eye and I was like and you win yeah that's one of the most horrific things I can think

of outside of genitalia anything on the junk seems to be the the ultimate well speaking

of shingles on the junk has nothing to do with what we're gonna surprisingly more diseases

than you might expect I'm Jamie chambers this is my sister Bambi hello this started because

I fell down a rabbit hole of genealogy after I got an ancestry.com DNA kit as a Christmas

gift this is not an endorsement I'm not being paid to talk about them it just is a thing

that's true but when I started got the DNA results then I started doing some family tree

business ended up subscribing to some paid services just so I can do the research and

then I started looking at history because I was gonna be a college history professor

once upon a time like that was how did that work out I changed my major twice minored

in history and then never did anything with it ever again so call it I'm really glad I'm

facing crippling student yeah how's that student loan not paid off yet so who knows what this

is actually gonna be called but I can tell you that's the main thing to know is I am

not a historian I only minored in history but I am kind of a fan and nerd about history

and so like one of the things I think I'm good at is is taking history making it relatable

to more people who aren't as into it as I am telling it in terms that you can kind of

get on board with and start to understand and however I'm probably like if we put this

online I'm probably gonna classify it as comedy because I intend to swear a lot and reference

drugs and no one can ever make me stop squaring it's it's really terrible old people

and small children just hate me yeah no your little kids should not listen to this fucking

podcast no little kids I'm to the point where if you don't like swearing around your child

please don't bring your child around me I'm just no longer give any Fox we will offend you so maybe

what we're gonna be doing today is I'm going to be giving you a hopefully not incredibly boring

nerdy history lecture but it's gonna be related to something in our family tree so we're gonna

start there with a family connection and luckily this is going back many generations so we can't

humiliate anyone currently alive which is you know it's good and also sort of and this is actually

like this story is one of the things that gave me the idea of doing this show at least the thing

we're gonna intro with and then it's gonna lead us into a larger historical topic that I don't

think enough Americans talk enough about or know enough about really so I was about to say that

could literally be anything so so what would be that's so vague what would be your fictional time

travel machine that we need to use to jump back to 18th century colonial America so well this is

gonna be full historical but I was just thinking like do we want to take like HD Wells's time

machine or the TARDIS oh no no I need mr. Peabody's way back mission okay excellent that's that's

where I am I if we're getting in a time machine I'm getting in with the dog excellent so we're

drivers and we're gonna take it back a first of the year 1756 before we jump back a few extra

years before that okay so it was Saturday February 10th 1756 a 12 year old boy named David Boyd was

sent by his mother to gather dry firewood while the father of the family was visiting their

nearest neighbor who was over a mile away this was central Pennsylvania in the mid 1700s when

these were like settler families that did not have a lot of neighbors they were just trying to carve

out they didn't have a lot of anything yeah period so these settlers were strict Presbyterians and it

was kind of their habit to get all the important work done by the end of the day because Sunday's

meant to be purely rest and worship grabbing his hatchet young David took his little brother John

jr. who was six years old along to gather the firewood that's when a band of Native Americans

from the Delaware tribe according to the sources surprised the boys and took them captive without

much struggle okay John Boyd senior the father was missed walking through the woods but the rest of

the family was gathered together the mother Nancy was not in great health and it could be that she

just hadn't recovered yet from childbirth well yeah cuz you probably had had several of those

shit like yeah there's like seven or eight of these Boyd kids oh yeah I mean women you know you

either gave birth to children or you died in she was constantly pregnant constantly because I mean

that was you're either pregnant or you were dead yeah and so far she had good luck when it came to

delivering all these kids unfortunately her luck runs out well this is not a great day for Nancy

um she all we know is that she wasn't in great health so it could be that she was still recovering

from childbirth because she's carrying her infant James Thomas but she can't keep up because these

are fast-moving native Raiders yeah and a bunch of like set of frontier settler children who are

all in great shape so well yeah I mean after your entire fucking reproductivism gets turned

into mincemeat yeah like seven for like the seventh time yeah in colonial times when there

was no such thing as modern medicine and she was probably just like leaky and bleeding and terrible

poor poor Nancy yeah and unfortunately things are not gonna get any better for me oh I hope Nancy

dies swiftly so this is pretty fucking grim but here we go she's got her infant son James Thomas

and they realize the natives realize this woman can't keep up they're taking prisoners but she

can't keep up with them and they're on foot so she sits the natives sat Nancy down with her baby

on a fallen tree and let her say goodbye to her children one at a time David he quoted her later

in life saying Oh God be merciful to my children going among savages she was only 37 years old once

the captive children were out of sight the Warriors left behind killed both the mother

and the child and scalped them both yeah sounds about right David and his sister Sally were forced

to later take turns carrying the scalps of their murdered mother and baby brother for an entire day

you know only one example of the humiliation and cruelty they'd be forced to endure which started

yeah cradling your mother's head yes the top of your mom's head and your little baby brother oh

that's that's fucking brutal we don't know exactly how old the kid was but it was less than a year

is that's that's kind of what we know so he's either a a small toddler or a true infant we

don't know either way that's pretty fucking rough and then they had to watch as their their home

their family farmhouse was looted and burned before they all had you run off taking turns

carrying mom's also sounds about right welcome to the mid-1700s it was a fucking terrible place

John Boyd senior the distraught father of this family was forced to watch his home burn from a

distance before setting off to alarm local settlers and organize a pursuit he took one

look at this situation is like I could rush down there and die yeah I mean dying doesn't seem like

a very intelligent option although you know when he finds his wife and baby's you know head

eventually hopefully then that's also fucking terrible yeah there's no there's not great either

way so but he did what made the most sense he went to organize people but because like their

nearest neighbor was the one he was just at a mile away by the way those two people were killed

in this raid as well they were childless that family completely wiped off the map and their

their home also burned so because the pioneers were scarce in central Pennsylvania took some

time to gather the needed men guns and supplies which was more than enough time for the Swift

Delaware raiding party and the white pioneer children to make a lot of distance when the

pursuit party led by John Boyd senior they found shreds of Nancy's dress clinging to some bushes

off a trail and then they followed tracks to a nearby ravine oh that's horrible and looking down

in the ravine they see these scalped and mutilated bodies of Nancy and baby James the headless

corpses well not decapitated just the time you know just scalped so by the world was terrible

yeah by the time David and his surviving siblings reached the native villages in what's now Ohio

John senior had given up hope of ever seeing his children alive again now we'll get back to David

in a different conversation but I bring his story up first because the earliest sources are all

about how cruel and the savagery of the native people but they always just talk about it just

purely in that context and never in the larger story about what else is going on so that's what

I'm gonna do today these brutal raids were part of a larger conflict that American history books

called the French and Indian War so like as a you know pulling from high school history do you

remember anything at all about the French and Indian War no not a thing I mean I could guess

that it would be between both French people and Native Americans about as much as anybody does

because the truth is our you know public education in the United States tends to gloss over this

because the Revolutionary War is only a couple decades away and that's the that's what excites

everybody because you know we're in terms of indoctrinate and we're not we're not French

indeed without this war and without our colonial ancestors victory in that war there would almost

certainly be no United States of America as we know it it's really fascinating struggle in its

own right while setting all the initial pieces on the the chessboard for what will eventually

be America's war for independence but it's also important to remember the French and Indian War

is just one theater in a larger conflict between European colonial powers that span five continents

Winston Churchill called it the true First World War beating the one we call World War One by 150

years because we didn't care about those people in fact that's exactly right nobody gave a fuck

indigenous populations in all of these places get caught in the middle and completely fucked

because these small relatively small European nations were projecting power all over the globe

yeah I mean it's like yeah the Native American people were very brutal and very savage and very

very very pissed off at this point and who could blame them this is when colonialism started really

getting going you know so this so the global war is called the seven years war which lasted either

seven years or nine years or maybe even 22 depending on which historian you ask and which

like which skirmish well if it's if it's the 22 year war I feel like the seven year war is a

really misnomer there's a big discrepancy I mean seven and nine chores seven and 22 that's pretty

fucked y'all you know it's all just about deciding at which point which point is like the starting

bell you know which things officially kicked it off because especially for the global war there

was a lot of stuff related to like royals like succession and like little territorial disputes

so it's there's an argument to be made of where it really started however a lot of people will say

get started in the colonies and that's what we're gonna get into I also started with David

Boyd's story for one more reason he is our fifth great-grandfather so that guy's entirely

kidnapped boys yes yeah that was our maternal grandmother's family so if you go to our

grandmother's father's father and going up to what our fifth great-grandfather that was David

Boyd who at 12 years old was kidnapped by Delaware natives and we will get back to him like I'm gonna

do a whole separate mini episode just in his life because I assumed all of our ancestors would have

boring as shit lives and then you found out about the horrific kidnapping yeah scalping that turns

into kind of a real-life Dances with Wolves kind of story it's really it's it's interesting and

complicated because it's like on one hand when you know the whole larger story you can understand

why the natives did their raids you can also understand why it sucks when your mom gets

scalped you know you're captured and tortured forced to carry around her but then later on like

I'll get out we'll talk about it later but David goes full native and and actually comes to love

the chief of that tribe who was there when his family was captured and his home burned but came

to see that man as his true father it's a it's an interesting story but we'll get back to him so

Stockholm syndrome we'll get back to David Boyd at another time because we're gonna at this point

we're gonna get into the larger history that's the why all that shit just happened to him and

his family the French and Indian French and any more so I'm not gonna get into the whole seven

years World War thing I'd rather focus on the slice of it that concerns our country and our

ancestors because we don't have like seven hours to talk about this the international business is

like an entire history course all by itself but ironically it's kind of worth noting that there

was a point where British soldiers were fighting the French and Indians from India on the

subcontinent while we had our own French and Indian war going on over here so there was too

many Indians we didn't really we're really bad at naming things misnomers yeah so we had literally

that level of confusion going on at that point so let's set the stage for our conflict England

and France had had beef for basically ever at this point in the 18th century always looking for

an excuse to you know get back for the previous scuffle that they'd had well I mean that's pretty

much half the wars throughout history oh yeah it's just you know well I mean revenge or get

territory you lost back and most wars are just pissing contests between men over land and rich

yeah you're trying to fight over fighting back and forth so England France constantly going at

it you know and meanwhile this was the like I said this has been colonized the colonialism

is really getting going so because white men didn't want to pay taxes going all over the

fucking rich white men didn't want to pay their fair share of taxes well that gets into American

Revolution of course like you're gonna see so much of like seeds of what makes Americans Americans

all the way back before there was such a thing the British colonies were all in the eastern

coastline of the United States and then the French were holding the territory to the north

north and west of the Appalachian Mountains so up into Canada and then going spilling down into the

mainland from there okay but over more on the western side so some coal motherfucking land

and similarly to know yeah there's a population difference so like for you know the British the

British population vastly outnumbered the French Canadians but at the same time France had vast

more territory kind of like how Canada is huge but has one-tenth of the population of the United

States because it's fucking cold there but that was the situation they were in now you always got

to remember the purpose of a colony is to generate profit for the mother country through the

mercantile well every everything is about profit always always now you know you know and that's

another thing like you know what they tell you back in school and the the sort of oversimplified

version of the mercantile system is that you know raw goods are gathered from the the colony shipped

back over to the mother country where they're turned into finished manufactured products and

then sold some of them sold back to the original people take places they came from with all of the

markups that come with overseas shipping twice and everybody getting their cut along the way but now

the British colonies for well over a hundred years had enjoyed what's called salutary neglect now

neglect doesn't sound good but salutary is literally the same root word as salute it

literally is like a term of respect basically saying hey the colonies are running themselves

and getting themselves established so we're not gonna enforce all of these taxes we're not we're

not gonna enforce the trades exclusivity that you would normally have so technically left alone yeah

there was technically a lot of smuggling going on that they just didn't bother to enforce and there

were taxes that they just they were on the books but they never once tried to collect things like

that so for a long time you know the American colonists got used to being left the fuck alone

so like the British the merchant class in England was super influential at the time so they were

making a lot of money they're all the rich you know the mid rich business owners they're making

money so everything's going well so so there's not a lot of reason for England to rock the boat

by enforcing all these rules so they were letting a lot go and the colonists were used to doing

things their own way meanwhile the native peoples had endured you know the encroachment of and

displacement while these European settlers for hundreds of years so by the time we get to the

are the mid 1700s there were already just tons of treaties alliances and trade agreements in place

so most of which weren't upheld yeah well they were you know after some time yeah it was very

Darth Vader of them you know we have altered the deal pray we do not alter it further even though

we're going to over and over again fuck you over you know until the end of time so but here there

were there was some differences so the French had all this land but not as many people so they were

they were more much more reliant on the natives so they worked really hard to have agreements that

they actually held up their end of the bargain more and they intermarried a lot so like the

French tended to drop their racial prejudices and enter into these highly profitable marriage

they sell their daughters that's you know that's pretty par for the course of you know the chief

you know marries off his daughter to this French Canadian business and meanwhile so his tribe can

suddenly help with their fur because the the French Canadians were doing their main source

was the fur trade so it's tons of trapping of animals in which the natives were really good

at helping with all that so everybody's making some cash and so the French you know dudes were

like oh I don't I will marry your daughter I am highly in love with all of the money we are about

to make it's not like wives aren't disposable anyway beaver pelts work for good money so

uh beaver pelts yeah it's like you just traded your daughter for a beaver pelt that's um no

that's no for all of the that's a beaver pelt for a beaver pelt the cash guns and booze you get

for selling your daughter to get beaver pelts to white people on the other side of the world

but that was just like you know so the French were had much stronger native alliances than the

British who would make a treaty and then violate it whenever it was convenient yeah even though

it's not to defend the French it's just there were less of them so they were kind of forced

into this situation so both sides start far apart on the map but colonizers be colonizing and as

both sides are expanding their territory it was like a pressure cooker you know eventually it was

gonna explode both France and England were claiming areas such as Nova Scotia and Acadia

and the north and Acadia as a side note is you know as a result of all the shit that we're about

to talk about the Acadian people were forced out and told to march south into what's now

Louisiana and that's where Cajun people come from but at first we're just talking about settlers in

small numbers so like our great-great-great-great grandfather we were talking about earlier and his

family so they would you know move over the other side of the Appalachian Mountains because it was

just amazing farmland you know in Ohio I mean always has been always will be probably yeah you

can grow some shit there yeah mostly corn lots and lots of corn and it was kind of a ballsy thing to

be an English settler in the Ohio River Valley because it was claimed by France there was a

disputed territory and it was also home to all these native tribes who were allied and intermarried

as fuck with all of the French people so to the natives raiding and burning these homesteads was

both getting rid of more white people and doing a solid for their French allies but on the British

side they had their own treaty negotiated by an a Native American leader named Tenogrison and I

probably completely butchered that guy's name so I'll just use the kind of cool nickname that the

white people gave him the half king the half half king it was in colonial history there was a few

people they nicknamed the half king and it's basically the racist version of respect because

he this guy was the chief of the Mingo people who were it's kind of like a blend of other tribes or

displaced or half wiped out and he was kind of the he was a leader among them so a not white guy

can't be a king so he's a half king so yes this is racism even in his nickname but still you know

half king still half a cool nicknames yeah so he's gonna come back into this story a couple of times

but for now just know that the half king had come to an agreement on behalf of like a whole tribal

council representing a number of different you know groups of Native Americans including the

Iroquois Confederacy I was about to say I wondered if the Iroquois League was gonna oh yeah the

Iroquois are all a part of this in fact at the moment he's he's been given kind of the blessing

to speak on their behalf even though sometimes they got their own people in there and once again

I'm kind of having to super simplify some of this stuff because we're doing a short podcast and not

like a 400 level American history class so it's already kind of warm in our pressure cooker when

the colonial powers turn up the knob by building military forts to project power directly into the

wilderness there had been previous scuffles there have been some treaties and more tension building

and then the the old governor general of New France died and his eventual replacement was

a guy named the Marquis Duquesne at this point French start getting a little bit more picky

about enforcing their treaties with their own tribal allies like for example the Miami people

are not supposed to trade with the British they have an exclusive deal with the French

and they're and so the French tell the Miami people to knock it off the Miami people ignore

them yeah because fuck you and so the French decide to call up some of their own Ottawa

tribal allies and send in some troops with muskets to straighten the Miami people out because

once again as cozy as the French were with the natives it only goes so far if you still fuck

with the money you gonna get shot well yeah because again it's it's really the bottom line

don't fuck with white people's money do not fuck with with people's money it's

it's our hard line but in this case they were simply just trading with everybody and not just

the French and then they got shot so by the time we get into 1753 it becomes clear that in order

to protect this really important region that everybody knows is going to be covered with

the best farms in colonial America the French will need to keep armed men in the region at all times

so up goes some forts and you can probably imagine what these 18th century wilderness forts look like

they're completely made out of wood from local timber there'll be a few central buildings

surrounded by a palisade which is like sharpened tree trunks in a fence all the way around so uh

but yeah the the forts were not the coziest of accommodations but were a hell of a lot better

than being camped in the middle of a forest filled with native Americans who are really good at

killing around in that said forest the French expanded south and they were kicking out any

British squatters along the way and then that caused more heated conversations to go back in

the colonial capitals about what's going on you know more and more French are moving into the area

and and then the native allies that were the natives of the British were saying uh what the

fuck and the half king he absolutely hated the French the guy told stories to anyone who would

listen that the French had killed had killed cooked and eaten his father oh i mean and if

that's true legit reason i mean yeah i'm even if you even just think that's true it's a legit

reason to hate the fuck those human eating motherfuckers i have no yeah once you get the to

the they ate my dad you can see some some not nice thing so the half king actually um marches

i also think scalp mom is is on that list too also pretty rough yeah so um so the half king

marches right up to the gates of Fort LeBeouf and yes like Shia LeBeouf translates literally

the beef oh so he goes into Fort LeBeouf and and just and just yells at them that he that

the French need to leave this area or he threatens military action and you can imagine you know the

French the other side uh you're going all Monty Python oh my ha ha ha your mother smells of

go away or i will taunt you a second time so uh so the half king goes off in a huff having

accomplished you know fuck all but but he's other than being like horribly mock he was rebuffed

rebuffed at LeBeouf so runners were dispatched to the to the important British colonial leaders to

let them know about the French troop presence in the Ohio River Valley and not only did the

British have their own claims to protect but there were important business contracts writing it because

once again there's always money history books often don't like to talk about all the money and

oh well that's the thing i mean money is at the root of all of it all evil i mean and we're about

to get into some evil all of it so the half king sent his people the the chief of the Mohawk uh

showed up on behalf of their tribal council like representing a whole nother group of native

Americans who were all allied with the British and demanded that the British live up to their

obligations to keep the French out of the area and when the governor of New York didn't immediately

just call up troops and like get this shit started they they took off pissed off and that

was the point where they say that the cozy relationship between the British and the Iroquois

Confederacy took a hit like it wasn't completely broken down at this point but i was about to say

because that came later yeah so the French have really strong alliances with their native allies

and the British just weakened their ones with the most important because in this in this area the

Iroquois are the ones you need the most now the Cherokee they're kind of in the background of

this story and through the course of the war they switch sides like four times and just like

whichever is the most expedient whichever way the wind blows yeah no no they're like all of them

were just trying to do the best they could in a shitty situation as they were slowly losing land

and having to i mean since we live on Cherokee land i mean we're recording this from occupied

Cherokee land so believe it or not we're that was all just the prelude to our real story

it's time to introduce our main character for the rest of this this talk today uh there are

plenty of important figures we could we could have picked and some different angles we could

have looked at but but as Americans and especially thinking of this from a you know quote unquote

family point of view there's only one choice the father figure of us all i speak of course of George

motherfucking Washington uh he's a complicated dude yeah he's all kinds of full of good things

and bad things rolled into one extraordinarily complicated human man but this is young George

Washington oh so was he less complicated and more of a dick i well i'm gonna be interested to see

like where you are at the beginning of this and then once we get to the end of the second part

or actually all of it just how your opinion will shift but just think back for a moment and think

of yourself just like in grade school like you know we all think of George Washington in the

Revolutionary War and as president first president of the United States some kid that chopped down a

cherry tree which turns out was complete and total utter bullshit and didn't even really happen or

have any kind of relevance in life and yet we still learn that yeah even and i'm pretty sure

that even halfway through high school i was convinced George Washington had a homicidal

hatred of cherry trees and a like a psychotic inability to lie and then you're like no that

motherfucker lied all of those things were true it turns out cherry trees were perfectly safe

around him and he lied his ass off when necessary however while being uh you know a relatively

forthright dude but as we're about to see so this is not the white-haired figure in the hall of

presidents at Disneyland in 1752 little Georgie was only 20 years old the age of your nephew

so that's you got to think about Xander yeah in your head in terms of like that's how old this

guy is when the story starts 20 year old punk ass kid this kid even though of course in the 1700s

even children are just considered little adults expected to just do what they needed to be done

but he was very ambitious but he had no idea the incredible place he would take in the world in all

of history but let's get like a visual picture of young George Washington at this point he's

six feet tall which is you know in mid-1700s is so pretty big guy so he's little shorter than

Xander right but yeah but if you grade him on a curve he would be more like six three or four

yeah because because people were average guys were more like five three to five four back then

so he was a pretty big guy and in fact he was strong as hell and his hands were so big he had

to have custom-made gloves for the size of his just oven mitt his big meat tennis racket size

hands so he's got reddish brown hair that's like tied back in a tight tail or sometimes fitted in

a silk bag and though we're a long way from his like denture years even at 20 years old George

had like Austin Powers like teeth dentistry is important children he had like terrible tooth

decay and so even at this age it was bad enough that like a friend from this time in his life

wrote a letter about how fucked up his teeth were and so he so he even at this young man he had this

very tight-lipped expression that you see in all of the paintings and statues because he just his

whole life he was super self-conscious about his teeth interestingly enough though he did not have

like the booming commanding voice you would expect from a George Washington though he was physically

strong George kept getting sick because this of course the era of just all kinds of disease

because it's like on one hand it's like before any real like actual medicine but it's also

when world travel was a thing and diseases were truly traveling the globe at at speeds never

dreamt before this this time like it literally took years for the black death to move from China

all the way to like western Europe but now shit can just move in a matter of months because of

all these ships going all over the world thank you imperialism so you know I can't I like traveling

so yeah no travel's good just so I mean not traveling on a boat for months or vaccines

getting lied to about you know how awesome this place is that's so just again despite being

physically strong George kept getting sick by the time he was 20 he'd already had malaria smallpox

and a nasty bout of pleurisy in his lungs which left him with kind of a weak breathy voice that

didn't seem to match his like you know super imposing things so I guess he talked kind of like

original Dumbledore from Harry Potter with kind of a wheezy voice I'm George Washington

that would be amazing uh so think about that for the rest of this story just this kind of

like kick-ass looking guy I cannot think it's Dumbledore George Washington just got really

fucked up in my head especially now like and then make them 20. 20 years old wheezy George

wheezy George and unfortunately like all later in life it's it's pneumonia that he that he caught

that killed him so his lungs got him in the end as they do yeah so young George was an interesting

guy kind of a study in contradictions his temper was absolutely terrifying so he worked at keeping

a tight lid in his emotions he developed self-control because if he lost his shit

it was bad and he was a big strong dude with you know massive hands well I mean you know

self-awareness he was a bit of a romantic but you know especially when he was like writing

love letters to his various you know young lady friends but he was always deadly serious and he

was like for a young man he was not the life of the party he was the guy who would be like even

when everybody else is trying to relax and have a drink he'd be the guy talking about politics and

current affairs even when you're just trying to have a good time dude I'm staying off social media

asshole I already told you I'm in my media bubble so George wanted very much to be part

of Virginia high society but he didn't have the money or the family name back from England to

carry him kind of a fancy boy he loved fashionable clothes and and enjoyed dancing like he learned

the latest courtly dances so if you imagine like Jane young wheezy George Washington doing Jane

Austin style you know dancing it was fine it was just that you don't really when you think of

George Washington you don't think of him really working hard to be this fancy boy he ordered his

clothes from London if you will yeah no he ordered his clothes from London every year so he was this

fancy boy but the flip side because it's always about these contradictions he was a natural

outdoorsman who adapted easily to life in the rough country I mean he that was a brave and

badass guy but what he wanted though was to be part of this you know high-end society he wanted

to be an important person well I would say then he accomplished his goal so and here's the sort

another ironic thing so once he did set his sights on military service what he wanted more than

anything else was a royal commission in the proper British army because in the colonies there was no

standing army they just called up militias when they needed them which were you know only got paid

for the time they did work and it was a lot less and there was a lot less prestige and so it was

sort of like you had to abandon your your farm and your bullshit do all this stuff at a moment's

where whereas if you actually get a commission in the British army that is a full-time gig

that comes with a lot of prestige and honor and can lead to the kind of political career that

George is already looking for so what he wants to do is fight for the British more than anything else

but it's but he but through his whole life for the British well isn't that he wants to be a red

coat and but he never manages to achieve this however to be fair he also goes on to defeat that

very army and become president of a whole new country so I think he wins I would say so I mean

considering you know he's the father of our country not just some nameless faceless British

soldier that's long dead and it will make anybody who's been a fuck up feel better when you hear

this story because it's not just all in one straight direction upward for George he has some

setbacks and but it starts though and I think this helps you understand too I'm gonna reference

Alexander Hamilton and even the musical Hamilton a few times but if you learn about young George

Washington and then you know a bit about young Alexander Hamilton later on you really get the

sense of why George Washington saw a lot of himself in Hamilton because they were both men

who had something to prove like Alexander Hamilton was the son of a Scottish nobleman but he was a

bastard in theory yeah in theory that's a whole nother story but in theory he had that name but

he was desperately poor and he always was trying to prove himself he was always trying and Hamilton

tried to fit in with fancy society and dressed himself up and all that shit you know George

there was a lot in common with these two guys even though George was not a bastard he was however

this the oldest son in a second marriage so it's like he had there was an original batch of

Washingtons and then the mom died and then several years later his dad Gus married another

woman and then George was the oldest of the second batch kids so that could go either way depending

on how his father would have how he liked his wives or children right and it's kind of this

thing basically was because no one was really protected they were a landowning family the

Washingtons had held land in Virginia going generations back even before for uh Augustine

which is you know Gus was his nickname uh Gus Washington's family history but at the same time

like this older batch of children got all of the best stuff they got they inherited the early

property and cash and got all this extra stuff they all got to go to paid primary school and

college George Washington had no formal schooling his entire life so and he was you could always

tell that was sort of a not only jealousy but kind of like a a shortcoming and he always felt

the absence of that because like his brothers learned how to speak French and could read Latin

and got all this advanced stuff and probably learned all those fancy dances in college

yeah George is having to you know go and learn all this stuff himself but George so he he was

you know kind of equivalently basically homeschooled and he did learn you know

certainly could read write and do math and solid stuff he just didn't have the classical education

that you get back the formal education that you would get so his mother had to have made up

right and actually his education and apparently you know he seems like he was a pretty educated

dude and not just his well not just his mother his mother was actually a bit crude and half

illiterate uh so George was on I don't mention her much but George had a complicated relationship

with his mother don't we all yeah I know right uh it's that's a whole nother interesting story

other he had some mommy issues too for sure and she kept fucking with his life at different so he

had mommy issues and some daddy issues daddy issues uh however his daddy issues were cut short

because his dad died before he was 12 years old so it's like on one hand he was well off by the

like by the standards of actual time by the standards of the time and actual working class

poor people he was well off but in terms of the Virginia high society that he aspired to be

he was far short down and he would he felt like he was a loser but he was very good at math

and it came in really handy because by the time he was 17 years old he got himself a gig as an

apprentice for a land surveyor and then eventually completed that and like went on by the time he was

19 years old he had a career going surveying okay so he would run off into the country you know you

know taking measurements and you know making meticulous notes for people for all these rich

people to come and occupy this land and to the point where he not only was had plenty of his own

freelance work but he got named the county surveyor of one of the counties in Virginia

so he had like okay yeah because i mean that was surveying was a huge when yeah yeah colonizing

literally no maps yeah and so they had to do it and these are people who are wanting to establish

farms and build buildings and you gotta you have to have a skilled surveyor just so you can make

all your plans and know where you're gonna build your shit and George was reputedly very good at

it and in fact he could have just done that and been successful and then in the end and probably

maybe no America well that would have been a shorter story yeah for sure the end roll credits

more than anyone else George looked up to his older brother Lawrence the oldest living Washington

he was a soldier and businessman land owner and politician that sound familiar yeah okay but

Lawrence came down with tuberculosis i think in his early to mid 40s if i remember correctly and

it was not doing so great having tv in the mid 1700s yeah i mean having tv now sucks oh it sucks

period but in this case when your doctor says you're probably gonna die but that maybe if you

go move to Barbados you're the the tropical climate might help you restore you i mean which

it won't hurt i would rather move to Barbados although i guess in that point too it's like well

unless you get malaria because having tb and malaria but the good news is they'd already had

everybody in Virginia had malaria by that point oh well there you go then so George dropped

everything and accompanied his brother to Barbados that was George's one and only time out

of the continental you know Americas and he got a little taste of that kind of uh island life and

saw a little bit more of the greater world but guess what spoiler alert it didn't work and

Lawrence returned to Virginia to die at his home in Mount Vernon where this seems to yeah so he

named his younger brother George as the heir to his estate in the event his own children didn't

survive you can probably guess how that turned out so i guess they didn't survive uh yeah

unfortunately poor Lawrence had four children all of them died before the age of five years old

most of them as babies which was common and unfortunately his little girl who survived him

only lasted to like four and a half and then she got sick of some childhood elements like

unfortunately it's like one of those things one of the most common misconceptions is this idea that

well the average age people died was in their 40s or early 50s or whatever but what they

don't understand is almost everybody died before they were five years old and so like

doing your babies dying or a childhood illness wiping a kid out at like three years old that

was super common or just accidents which is dangerous to be a kid back then but if you live

if you made it to like a teenager you were probably going to have a normal life expectancy

even by our standards you're probably going to live to your 60s to maybe even 80s if you're

really lucky so it's just math that makes it where you ever you know the average age and

that's a major misconception children die and i mean you know it's like you have eight children

and you have two surviving children that was pretty common fucks up the math and that's why

you also have all those kids vagina so yeah then this poor and once again this poor woman uh she

had had four children by Lawrence Washington none of them survived like imagine having to bury four

kids and then he dies then she goes and remarries so that instantly means Mount Vernon goes to

George and interestingly enough total side note but Mount Vernon was named for a British admiral

named Edward Vernon who was Lawrence Washington's commanding officer when he'd been in the British

military so the most like super famous American historical sites named after a British admiral

well you know nothing's perfect so uh 1752 Washington's hit this point where he wants

to own property not just be a surveyor for a bunch of other people and you get there really

get the sense that he wants to follow his dead brother's lead and kind of like achieve the things

that Lawrence could have if he had lived long enough like political clout right yeah now that

he can be that he can have the social standing that he wants yeah Lawrence Washington he'd held

a position on the house of burgesses which was like a high ranking like it was a search of a

legislature type position okay and so and Washington wanted to have a similar thing so he had

political goals he wanted to own money he wanted to have business deals he wanted wanted to wear

fancy shoes and dance is that all of the above and marrying well so we're saying yeah George

is trying to live up to his to what Lawrence might have done if he'd have survived but tuberculosis

took out Lawrence so that meant the net the thing missing on George's resume next was military

service and this is just as our pressure cooker in North America is heating up so one of the things

that's not brought up much like I said earlier is how much money and business interests factor into

the lead up to the French and Indian war the British government had awarded a huge land grant

to the Ohio company this collection of these business land speculators and if the French

held on to all this land in the Ohio River Valley they stand to lose a fortune okay the Ohio company

made a recommendation to build a fort at the forks of the Ohio River so it's like the perfect spot

where the rivers branch off to establish control of the area the fort forks the the fort at the

forks and so like right here would be a perfect spot you know have a fort with a bunch of troops

stationed that way they can protect settlers and you know you always have people in the area

to establish control one of the major investors in the Ohio company was none other than Lawrence

Washington so who died this same year when this is going on but he had been part of this like

he drafted this recommendation like we should build a fork here please Virginia government do

that um so when the Governor General Duquesne of New France learned of the the British proposed

forts he's like well we got our own forts we will build their own forts from Lake Erie all the way

down to the Ohio River and probably had both middle fingers raised while he was doing it so

like so the British announced that they want to build forts and he's like well we're gonna build

our own forts directly opposing your forts so they can taunt each other from across the river

so once again the temperature's going up we're not we're not there at war yet so so no now it's

just like the insults and the antics ensue right so on the British side the awesomely named Robert

Dinwiddie was Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie he is a major player in this not Dimwiddie but Din

Dinwiddie it is a very like JK Rowling kind of name so he is the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia

also a major investor in the Ohio company along with Lawrence Washington but as as the

Lieutenant Governor he was also in a position to do something about it he petitioned the British

crown for permission to build the proposed forts in the contested land took an entire year but

orders came back from London build the forts and send an envoy to inform the French that their

presence in the Ohio River Valley was no longer welcome George saw his opportunity and went for

it requesting the appointment as the envoy I'm gonna guess that didn't go well well that's what

we're about to talk about now you might wonder why the hell anyone would appoint a 21 year old

kid with zero military experience in charge of an important expedition that like with diplomatic

implications across the globe yeah yeah but then you remember that George was known because he was

working so hard to fit in with all these folks and was out there surveying all this land so

they knew he had experience going out into the woods and dealing with shit and you also remember

George's older brother was a major investor in this company that's the whole reason we're doing

this and then so now he's a major shareholder so you can make you can probably guess that the

Governor Dinwiddie felt better that somebody with the company's interests in mind was the guy

leading this expedition and in fact uh George through the rest of his life was accused of

representing the company the Ohio company not necessarily the the British government and the

Virginian colonists that tracks it's hard to really say however it's hard to really say however that

sounds like a track but once you see how this all goes it's like so George is a complicated guy

you'll have to tell me how you feel about him after the end of all this shit so uh lord I don't

know how I feel about him now I doubt any more information's gonna help that the orders were

simple enough Ron Chernow writes in his biography of Washington quote if the French were found to be

building forts on English soil they should be peacefully asked to depart if they failed to

comply however we do strictly charge and command you to drive them off by force of arms this order

was signed by none other than King George the second the father of the father yeah I was about

to say so this is daddy of our King George from our story of the American Revolution

all King George's you know so in this point the you know George Washington is acting under direct

orders from King George himself so the newly minted major George Washington and yes that's

right he goes from never having served any military experience to now he's a major in

charge of this expedition by means of money yeah wasted no time in recruiting his team

even though however to be to be fair one of the things he does he is not given any upfront cash

he has to fund all this shit himself and get paid on the back end but that's what you do because

he's he's wanting to fit in with all these rich folk and that's how this is done well I mean

that's a lot of that that tracks as well I mean especially if you're a history of America yeah

if you're a gentleman and you're going to serve your your country you're expected to fund it and

then you know you come back and then we'll pay you and hope that they actually live up to that

agreement because the U.S. Congress doesn't like to do that either yep we're gonna get to that

because they sucked from before inception yeah but there wasn't they weren't even a thing and

they fucked this up somehow so uh he so so George go wastes no time in recruiting his team making

sure to get several people who are very familiar with the western country and the local natives

and one thing George knows how to do is go off for months into the country at this point because

he's been doing it in the wilderness he's been doing it for years now as part of his job as a

surveyor so they made their way through the untamed wilderness dealt with some shitty weather

and there's this one point where this is Pennsylvania in the middle of winter so it's

cold as fuck there's snow icy rivers everywhere and so they get to a river crossing and there's

just like it's like ice flows you know flowing down the river they're all putting their stuff

in canoes or rafts and going to bed you know easier crossings and George decides you know

to swing his dick a little bit and show everybody how cool he is he rides his horse directly into

the water and the horse swims across and he's like high in the saddle just looking every inch

the total badass as the horse just cuts through this icy water and then the horse gets hypothermia

and dies not this r.i.p horse no we're not we're not to the point where horses die yet not yet we

have multiple horse deaths in this story we're not there at this point to be fair this is just

a baller move he just looks cool everybody's just like oh look at that people tell the stories of

this guy as he rides his horse straight into the water and in you know through his entire life

George is is an incredible horseman this is like one of the things he's very good at he's an

accomplished rider and he does this scene even in the revolutionary war later on middle-aged George

Washington rides his horse across rivers and everybody's like damn so it's just one of his

signature moves just to show how cool he is he knows how to do this I've trained my horses

bitches so then it was like once they cross this is where they get to that the forks in the Ohio

that that his brother had prized as this spot so they they make a camp and then George starts

taking you know doing his surveying thing and taking great notes first thing okay this is where

we need to build this fort uh for his report so then he dispatches messengers to the local

tribal leaders because he needs information about French activity and he wants an escort to fort the

beef so that's when tenagreson I think that's what he's called the half king comes back into

the story and even though this guy's twice George's age they say that they got along like George

earned some respect from this guy because once again he may be he may be a little bit of a fancy

boy but he he's a fair is tough and brave so uh and that's another thing too where George and his

if you if you read his journals and letters he's kind of a mixed bag when it comes like he's not as

instantly racist as some of the people of his time like he's respect instantly racist he's

as he's respectful for what the natives are good at but he also he essentially calls them all

mercenary and money grubbing and and questions their loyalty which if you read the rest of this

well I mean that could be fair though if he's questioning loyalties they didn't have a whole

lot of them like if you hear the rest of this story and look at it purely from his point of view

you can see where he's coming from but if you look at it from their point of view you can totally

understand why they're just trying to make the best of you know they got this bad hand like oh

excuse me can you please help me with this land I'm stealing from you so this was still the age

of genteel war and diplomacy so George reaches this like little French trading post and they

immediately invite him to dinner as their guests they all they the wine is flowing freely at this

dinner French are getting all completely wine drunk and George is just sitting there listening

while they just say the quiet part out loud they're like oh yes well the French will dominate

this region and kick the British out and he's just like oh okay I see how this is and he's quietly

taking notes for his entire life George is not much of a drinker and he also thinks that people

serving the military shouldn't drink at all and once again there's a couple points in this story

it's like okay I get why he has this opinion this is one of them where it's like he's there as this

diplomat and they're literally saying his his mission is doomed to fail I mean he's just doing

the courtesy of handing them a note that they're going to ignore and then telling them telling him

to his face but then they they provide him an escort so this one he's got a French escort and

in his native escort taking him all the way to Fort Shia LaBeouf he delivers the message on

behalf of the British crown and then they ask him you know can you hang out for a few days

while we send word back and to Governor Duquesne we got to find out you know we got to give you

a message to send back to your guys so he walks around and takes this shitload of notes about

where all the where all the people with guns are it's like oh there's a guard tower here there's

this many dudes this is I mean it was it was very nice of them to give him a grand tour of their

facilities yeah and he wasn't being dishonest like everybody knew he was doing he's walking

around taking what are you doing I'm surveying it's like I'm just counting the guards up there

in that tower so the friend the trip back home was difficult they decided uh you know this is

the middle of winter the horses are not doing well so they abandoned their horses so the whole

is the force her first death maybe the horses are okay I don't think the horses are okay I don't

think they made it uh you don't know that they're resilient creatures they are uh they ditch the

horses uh and George actually dressed up like a native american he actually put on like buckskin

walking leathers he and maybe even moccasins so a little cultural appropriation well he was in

disguise I gotta hike through central Pennsylvania these clothes are way better than my fancy boy

officer uniform probably yeah he he winterized yes he winterized and and so they're hiking back

the rest of the way and it was quite a little adventure so um at one point George he'd gotten

ill again and was so tired and exhausted and malnourished that he actually had one of their

native guides holding his backpack and then in the middle they're walking through a field and

suddenly this guy just runs out in front of them whips out his horse pistol and just tries to shoot

these guys pulp fiction style and so the guy misses the bull just whizzes behind the shoes too

holy fuck so George like immediately like are you shot no are you shot no so George's friend uh

runs over beats the shit out of this guy whips as he should whips out his musket is about to blow

his brains out and George's like no no no stops out don't kill him just because he tried to kill

us doesn't mean we need to kill him um well I mean that's that's debatable that's so that's

a conversation I guess the next move they decide to tie the guy up to a tree and then release him

at night and so then they're like terrified that guy's gonna go get friends and come back and

finish them off so George's friend because it's just the two of them at this point are just

running for it in the opposite direction trying to lose you know trying to lose this guy in case

guy and they're just terrible there's other guys just so pissed he's like why didn't you let me

shoot him we're gonna die because of you so so the next day they get to another river crossing

and the river is almost completely frozen over there's just like a chunk in the middle

of that's just not frozen over and so they spend all day constructing a crude ass raft

to float their way across and so while George has a has made a makeshift pole he's just kind

of pulling through the water suddenly an ice float goes loose hits his pole and knocks him

into 10 feet of like freezing ass water hypothermia yeah so so he uh so George

scrambles back up to the raft and they make it over to this tiny little island where there's

no fire they just hover shivering in this island all night long in the middle of this is February

in Pennsylvania I believe so I guess it's advantageous for America that he didn't just die

there yeah and funny enough it was his friend who ended up getting frostbite not George because once

again he was a tough bastard oh goodness he made his way back to Williamsburg and delivered the

sealed fuck you letter from the French to governor Dinwiddie and then the governor gave him one

entire night to turn his like seven thousand words worth of notes into one concise report

and didn't tell him it would be published all over the world but George he stayed up all night did it

and that put his name out there for the first time and definitely not the last so this was George's

first adventure into the wilderness which was just for governor Dinwiddie for governor Dinwiddie

and it was just a formality it was just to tell the French you have to leave and the French saying

no no how about no I don't you a second time so uh what really pissed George off was he got a

measly 50 pounds for his trip which would be the equivalent about 30 000 in modern dollars but you

also remember he had to pay for all of it up front so he basically got his expenses covered comes

back and doesn't have like really jack to show for it other than he almost died of pneumonia died and

of getting shot pneumonia however he was given orders to raise up and train a hundred militia

for you know what was going to be the next move and so George decides a little political calculus

he's like okay I'll do this but um and George has this thing where he always combines like humility

with a bit of ego and so he's like yes and I humbly ask the you that I should be promoted

to lieutenant colonel and it was granted lieutenant colonel George Washington 22 years old

so at this point in Washington's life you have to kind of understand that it's like on one hand

he had some land he had some things going on but they were all kind of self-sustaining and weren't

giving him a lot of money to work with so he actually needed a job it wasn't like he was

independently wealthy like he didn't have fuck you money he still had to work and this paycheck

versus pride thing was kind of a recurring theme with him so you know officers in the colonial

militia got paid a lot less than those royal appointed ones we were talking I was about to

say that paycheck versus pride thing that sounds very Hamilton yeah and so more than once George

actually turned down a paycheck and he volunteered his services rather than be paid less than what he

believed he was worth and that was really one thing kind of a political calculus because if

he just took this short-term job in the colonial militia people could always say he was doing it

for money or because of his connections to the Ohio company but by by volunteering and not

accepting the salary he was able to say well I was just wanting to serve my country I was just doing

my part but he but the thing was political clout instead of actual capital but he couldn't afford

it there was a point where he had to borrow money from other people and that also sounds about right

that that's a very uh white male thing to do he wants to be proud he wants to everybody to think

he's this yeah everyone wants him to think that he's a bigger he has a bigger dick than he does

that sounds about right and Washington has some serious he's both ambitious and he has

some pride he has some dick swinging to do yet and it may be that he that he borrowed money from

his like one of his best friend's fathers while he was flirting heavily with that guy's wife so

I'm gonna have to learn how to not audibly sigh so much if I'm ever gonna make this work so but

getting back to the military career as you can imagine George's 100 militia volunteers weren't

exactly the cream of the crop oh you don't say so these are all guys who decided inbred farmers

yeah they didn't have proper clothing weapons or gear they were drunk half the time and he was that

sounds very America though he was constantly pissed off too that under the English system

he was forced to obey the orders of a low-ranking officer if said officer had a royal British

commission so that means even as a lieutenant colonel he'd have to obey a captain even though

he technically ranked because British so this is the British outranked Americans just by being

British this just stung at George's pride oh I'm fucking sure inside he was wanting to take his

massive hands and just crush the skulls of these assholes but he couldn't so he just tried to make

the best of things and make his ragtag troops ready for their second mission into the wilderness

meanwhile governor Dinwiddie sent a guy named William Trent with 40 men out to the forks of

the Ohio in early 1754 that spot that George had surveyed out to begin construction of a small

fort the French however sent over 500 soldiers with additional support to secure the area

but once again we're still in gentlemanly time so the French officer not only allowed the British

workers to leave peacefully but he actually purchased their their tools and construction

equipment for a fair market price so he gave them cash and then sent them on their way I know right

well we were already here however while they were leaving essentially flipping the two middle

fingers because they tore down everything the British made and built a much more grand larger

series of structures that they named after their recently promoted governor general of New France

Fort Duquesne sounds douchey yeah there's douches aplenty in this story our cup overflow with

say I don't think this is it's all douche it is nothing but a big squeegee of vinegar water yeah

so Dinwiddie sent Washington and his men into the wilderness to secure and assist with the

construction of what was supposed to be Fort Trent but on the way the guys are coming back

the other direction with none of their equipment and like about that fort so he's like learning

this on the way he's only got 100 guys with him so then his tribal allies show up including once

again the half king who looks at these hundred assholes and is immediately not thrilled with

the situation yeah well you know I'm not thrilled with the situation because he had just been out

there in the Ohio country and he knows how many French soldiers are there and he's like and you

show up with these guys um but George is like he assures everyone he's like no no this is the

tip of the spear we're just the vanguard of this huge British host with cannons and and all kinds

of guys so he bullshitted them yes he was 100 talking out of his ass at this time I mean

sometimes a bunch of bullshit you can if you can get away with it it's like he's not going to

get barely into this trip and immediately turn around and run back to Governor Dinwiddie and

said oh there's there's too many of these guys man he's not gonna do that he's got he's trying

to prove himself and he's got dicks to swing he's 22 years old and I can tell you as a guy who was

once a 22 year old male you are convinced you're invincible and you can just pull off any impossible

task that you set for yourself so after clearing out an area and establishing a temporary base

they got word of a small French scouting force not far away and then that night they're they're

camped and everybody is hearing people skulking around they're convinced that there are French

spies creeping around their camp they don't catch anybody but they're like their nerves are shot

they're convinced they're all about to be murdered in their sleep paranoid yeah they're they're all

freaked out the the scouts find a small group of French Canadians encamped nearby in kind of a

hidden glen so George decides they're going to go after these guys because they said they're

convinced that they were the ones they were around in their camp they're the French spies right the

half king scouted the enemy's location found out where these guys were encamped and so they decide

to march through the night to prep their first engagement with the enemy now I've seen photographs

and watched a video of a guy walking around the location that this this happened in George's story

is that they they sort of completely surrounded the glen but were spotted by the French who

immediately opened fire on them so the battle immediately ensued and that may be true I have

no way of knowing what happened for sure but if you look at the terrain it was an ambush it sounds

like a bunch of bulls it was an ambush because it's like it's like there's there's like a high

ridge with a bunch of tree cover and that's where George and his guys were positioned and he sent

all the natives on the back side to cut off any possibility of retreat so all the French are

literally like asleep in their bed rolls and then if you look at the numbers you know 10 French

soldiers were shot dead and more were wounded almost nobody gets hurt on the British side and

so the like the whole thing was over in like 15 minutes so what happened next is also debated to

this very day the French commanding officer was named Joseph Coulon de Jumonville and he was

bearing diplomatic papers on his person that means if the French forces had simply been on a

diplomatic mission and if George had fired on them unprovoked then he'd have committed a no-no

in this age of genteel gentlemanly warfare that we've been talking about so obviously there's no

way he would have done that so there are three versions of this story we'll see what we'll see

what you think might have happened after you hear all of them this is a very clue moment so

one version of this story and maybe the most dramatic is that uh that this guy Jumonville

was wounded during the skirmish but then he started waving his papers around in the air

like I am a diplomat I am a diplomat do not shoot and then started reading his own message from the

French government declaring that all British were ordered to leave the Ohio river valley

so the half king walks right up to the officer and splits his face open with a tomahawk in front of

god and everybody oh that tracks that guy really hated the French remember the whole I mean you

know father thing he yeah I'm you ate my father prepare to die and if that wasn't enough he dipped

his hands in the officer's brains and then scalped him now the second version of the story says that

Jumonville was just simply shot and killed in the short in the middle of the battle and that's just

all there was to it either way he's dead and then what happens next isn't up for debate the native

Americans descended on the wounded French soldiers braining just smashing in the skulls of all of them

and scalping all of them so like the ones who just simply surrendered were allowed to live but all of

the wounded were just massacred right then and there the natives just finish off and scalp the

wounded French so George Washington was the commanding officer during an ambush that included

atrocities that were a bit foreign to the European sensibilities though to be fair if he was too hard

in his native allies they would abandon the British and he'd be up shit creek without even

a paddle or a canoe so while the George claimed the French fired first and reasoned that they were

on a diplomatic mission he was like well if these guys wouldn't have picked such a hidden spot for

their camp if they were truly diplomats they just walked right up and handed us a note and they were

sneaking around our camp the night before which means they're spies and it was totally cool every

we did everything right you guys it's totally kosher it's fine and you know so George always

maintained this to the day he died that this was a legit fight and that the other guys fired first

which is a smart thing to say because most historians consider the battle of Jumonville

Glen the first shots fired in the French and Indian war and which also means that depending

on how you look at that this may be one of the opening skirmishes of an entire world war that

spanned five entire continents thanks George now the French version the third version of the story

you would basically know that the you know the revolution was just two guys named George

swinging their dicks around indeed but at this point the Georges are all lined up against the

French their dicks are swinging in the same direction so the uh the third French version

of the story paints the British as dishonorable ambushers who shot Jumonville in the head while

he was reading his papers and they actually said that the Native Americans prevented a total

massacre they even said that the natives actually rushed forward and put their bodies in harm's way

to prevent all of the prisoners from being executed and once again if you remember how

the French are trying to make their allies happy painting natives as heroes once again

it makes sense so everybody has reasons to lie about all this so there's no way to know the truth

the truth is everyone was wrong and everyone was terrible yeah and they probably just

it could have literally been anything but as far as the French go George Washington is a war

criminal and that may be fair so he sends the message back to Governor Dinwiddie who's stuck

with okay what do we do now but remember there was direct orders from the crown if the French

don't leave you're supposed to shoot at them so so Dinwiddie's like okay so he sends strings of

wampum which I don't know if you remember what wampum but that was sort of like the the beads

made of seashells and and oysters and stuff like that that was used as currency and trade between

tribes it was sort of like the native de facto trading thing so sends wampum and barrels of rum

for quote Indian diplomacy while writing letters back to London and making it sound like the

British troops were just minor partners we had to help them out we were allies after all we were

there to shoot them yeah you know and you know the French got shot so either way the consequences of

these actions spiraled far beyond the colonies and contributed to the whole global seven years

world war thing or 22 as as Ron Chernow puts it while the folks at home embraced him as an

improbable hero Washington was denigrated in England as a reckless young warrior and in

France as an outright assassin so again way to go George I can't think of George Washington as

an assassin though I mean he's I mean I my knowing how he presented us often as I've been

reading a lot about young George Washington I don't think I am busher I don't think he knowingly

shot the guy waving around diplomatic papers either it's true that one of the natives killed

the guy because if he was wounded they did kill all the wounded people or they just got shot in

the battle and he just died as a result of that but I don't think he intentionally pulled that

pulled that move because even he for once again that wouldn't have gone with the reputation he

was going for but he was but it happened but he was stuck with what happened now accounts of

George's command style over the years always point to his homicidal bravery I mean he was always

willing to put himself in incredible danger and over the course of his life had multiple horses

shot out from under him or would go back and find just bullet holes in his coat and he just acted

like he was invincible and frankly there's no evidence to say that he wasn't bullet proof

because he never got shot his entire life despite putting himself in many situations where he was

getting shot at and he always led from the front like he was not a he deflected them just now

during around this time in his early 20s he wrote to his brother Jack quote I have heard the bullets

whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound which again he was writing

to his brother trying to sound tough and cool like he was the Patrick Swayze of the day very

very you know very macho oh wow and funny enough this there's the word of that got out and at one

point King George was like like you may perhaps he'd change his mind if he hears a few more uh

yeah I mean so George pulls his men back several miles to a defensive position and begin

construction on a little emergency fort so they could dig in and not because George does not want

to run away all the way back to Virginia he wants to hold the ground that they of course because

he's you know swing still swinging his giant he's invincible bullet deflecting dick but he knows

that he's not in a great position he so he's smart enough you can get an idea of his mindset by the

name he gives this little fort fort necessity for necessity I mean which is the mother of all

invention when the tribal allies took stock of the situation they realized the British were

incredibly outnumbered and they decided to peace out making them making the British even more

vulnerable well actually Virginians the half king described fort necessity as that little thing upon

the meadow oh what that can't possibly I mean that's not good for George's giant dick no so

they got deserted the natives were like oh fuck this we have zero no reason to die here for you

guys no thank you so one thing I'm completely skipping over is all the road building that's

been going on this whole time and throughout the war so you can pretty much assume that whenever

we're not talking about building a fort or a battle there are people working on roads full

time because you need them in order to get supply wagons in to get troops in faster roads are a big

deal everybody you know they learned that lesson well from the Roman Empire that good roads mean

you can get things and people around fast so they're doing all that so while they're working

on this fort and getting everything ready they're also building roads so that the people in cannons

and they do get a little bit of reinforcements from Virginia so they they're up to 300 men in

fort necessity and so in June 28 George calls everyone back into the fort from road building

and such to brace for an upcoming French attack he realized a couple things quite quickly his men

were exhausted malnourished and he didn't have nearly enough fighting men to defend the flimsy

fort you can almost say they were outgunned outmanned outnumbered outplanned yeah and well

that's that's a prequel for his entire career yeah as a military commander I mean that was

you just described the entire like American army he was used to being behind the eight ball but

like the Spartan warriors of the bronze age George was convinced his 300 men could hold out against a

much larger force despite the fact that shabby fort necessity was very badly placed it was too

small and it was in a meadow surrounded by woods and higher ground oh ew yeah so George defends

this the rest of his life like uh and I was not an idiot when I picked this spot for this fort

but the truth is it was like the perfect place the worst spot to have a fort right you give the

French yeah sharpshooters an elevated position where they can use trees as cover I don't know

jack about shit but I know you want the high ground and again I know jack about shit when

it comes to like any kind of hunting military even just wilderness granting the enemy a raised

position to fire on you from cover isn't the best planning my 10 year old with a nerf gun can can

strategize better so but George did once again his his pride forces him to defend this decision

for the rest of his life he's lucky that he didn't have to defend that fort for the rest of

his life well his life would have been short if he fought to the death so on the way the French

forces found the the site of Jumonville Glen and the and the bodies just laying out there

and were decidedly pissed off it probably didn't help that the commander of the French

forces was Jumonville's older brother looking for some very personal payback yeah that tracks

so I keep bringing up Hamilton but if you remember in the musical there's a line Washington

does and I'll try to sing that line acapella he goes I was younger than you are now when I was

given my first command I led my men straight into a massacre I witnessed their deaths firsthand

this is what he was talking about this moment right here at Fort Necessity the colonial troops

were already surrounded by constant gunfire when God decided to make things worse and a heavy rain

began and this is back in the days when keeping your powder dry was like an actual thing you had

to worry about so suddenly their muskets are completely useless went from bad to worse yep

so ultimately just stupid and because the fort was so small and they had 300 guys they had to dig

trenches all the way around and just position some guys just in the trenches so these guys

were literally just getting shot at and they're there's like and they're filling up with mud

and blood and then meanwhile because they couldn't fit any of the animals that they

had with them as part of their you know a roving supplies they just were all left out in this open

meadow so the French and natives just butchered all the horses cattle and dogs to deprive the

colonials everything everything because so they're inside they're around they have like a little bit

of flour and bacon left a hundred of the Virginians have already been killed by gunfire but if you

want to know how bad it is one-sided the French suffered only three dead and 17 wounded so 20

total casualties even though they're good job George good job so that night the French decided

they signaled they would be willing to you know negotiate surrender like they knew they that the

British were fucked inside fort necessity the Virginia militia men had had about enough of this

so they busted out the room that was meant for Indian diplomacy and got shitfaced drunk as one

does because they were all yeah you're either looking at death or imprisonment a third of them

were already dead you're looking at starvation death they hadn't yeah there was there was there

was nowhere for them to go but drunk they were out of food they were they couldn't even shoot

their fucking guns they couldn't they couldn't even shoot themselves so we're getting fucked

yep so so they had an epic death party so George realizes that his men basically just they were

just getting trashed and so he had to wave the proverbial white flag which could have actually

been a physical white flag oh yeah they did that back then but it wasn't it might not have even

but in this point it still had to come like the sad part was like it still came from the French

side first like hey do you guys want to surrender because we don't really want to kill all of you

an interpreter went back and forth between the two sides uh George yeah uh the interpreter went

back and forth between the two sides and the guy finally coming back with the with the terms

written the all the terms of surrender written in French the ink running from the rain so when

George signed the surrender agreement he didn't realize it included a confession for the

assassination so he accidentally confessed he actually convinced he was accidentally confessed

to the political assassination of a French diplomat you know in any other story this would be

the sad end of George for being a political assassin so this naturally provided plenty

of justification for further French support of the war was a total black eye on the diplomatic

reputation of England who had treated George himself so honorably like like already the

newspapers all over the world had learned about what George had done so if that wasn't bad enough

they seized George's diary and passed it back to Governor General Duquesne oh that's terrible

who made fun of Washington and then and then published the entire thing in Paris

that's such a dick move I mean it's kind of glorious look at this asshole yeah so so this

is a low point in George's career I was about to say I've never heard this so this is like so George

so poor George was defeated having been humiliated George and his men are allowed to march back

they're not taken as prisoners they're just ordered to leave and for necessities torn down

George is defeated his reputation has been curb stomped and then his brother's Lawrence's last

surviving child dies and George inherits Mount Vernon he resigns his commission in the Virginia

militia and decides to set about preparing his first planting of tobacco and that's where we're

going to end part one on young George Washington and the French and part one next time when we get

together I'm going to tell you about George's third and final expedition in where he has to

take a subservient role this time because now some things are going to get shaking the war is going

to heat up the the British are going to decide they want to they're going to fund a much more

aggressive campaign they're going to send in regular British troops the guy George wants to

be part of that he wishes he was an officer of and unfortunately George is forced to serve under

a very traditional stuffy British general named Braddock well I mean after being publicly

humiliated to the entire world with the reading of one's diary so this is George's chance this is

when he this is now salty George if he is he has to suck up his pride but if he wants to

to salvage his military reputation he's got to go do this one more time and Braddock is one of

these guys who thinks that you should like you fight like you do in the old country you you march

your dudes in red coats and you put them in a field and you line them up all next to each other

and you you signal that it's time to start shooting each other yeah that's dumb yeah the

French don't fight that way in the colon you know in the American colonies so that's gonna go badly

and uh and George is gonna have to be there to to pick up the pieces when it does oh George

oh George yeah so then we'll we'll get on to what his and we'll talk about how all of the fallout

from from all of this directly contributes to a bunch of pissed off Americans who decided to

shake off a bunch of these colonists yeah and they're fucking taxes and they're bullshit

yeah and even though we'll get into this too this is also interestingly a period where when

this war heats up is the first time that there is a meeting between representatives from all

13 colonies so it establishes this precedent so the idea is do we do we join together as colonies

to support the war effort to fight the French because the colonies had all they were just all

independent of each other they didn't other than some trade had nothing to do with each other up

to this point so they came up with uh the the chief architect of what they called the Albany

plan because it was done in Albany New York was none other than Benjamin Franklin and he published

a very famous political cartoon of a snake in 13 segments and underneath it it says join or die

which even though it didn't work the Albany plan was approved by the the little convention they

called but the state not states yet but the colonies didn't approve it back home so it got

rejected but it laid the groundwork and that slogan and even the image of a snake representing

the colonies which will be used later in the revolution with the don't tread on me which is

now used by douchebags okay so signing off i will just simply say if you want to follow me any of

the crap that i do on the internet i have a website called jamiechambers.net that will take you to the

other stuff if you want to financially support the stuff that we're doing with this you can check out

my patreon at patreon.com slash jamie chambers and that's it for me Bambi probably wants to avoid all

contact yeah please don't don't look don't find her don't look for her if you see her in public

don't acknowledge her yeah maybe wave it depends on what kind of day i'm having you can side eye

her yeah you will never find me on twitter ever um you possibly can find me on facebook but good

luck with that i post never yeah it's i i have zero online presence and i intend to keep it that

way somewhat well except for now except well again this is very limited this is more like

your online presence not mine you get to listen you to listen to Bambi share her opinions and

you can completely leave her yeah exactly so you know what you don't you don't have to even like

my opinions i give no thoughts at all so i'm not even saying i'm right so forward your sexist and

harassing emails to me your misogynist bullshit directly to jamie because i i will deal with it

over her behalf no interest so next time we will talk about george washington and the end of all

this bullshit and some more douchebaggery