Jumonville Glen is a secluded ravine in a wilderness landscape like the one that covered much of North America in the mid-1700s, when France and England both claimed the Upper Ohio Valley and moved toward conflict. Through the rainy night of May 27, 1754, George Washington, a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia, and forty soldiers followed an Indian scout seven miles from the main British camp at Great Meadows to this area, where thirty-one French soldiers under Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de Jumonville, were camped nearby and unaware of their approach. On May 28, Washington's Virginia militia and about twelve Indians skirmished here with Jumonville's small French party in a brief clash in which ten French were killed, including Jumonville, twenty-one were captured, including one wounded, and one man escaped to report the attack, which became known as the Jumonville Affair. The confrontation, often seen as the opening shots of the French and Indian War, helped set off events that led to a wider world war. The retaliation came on July 3, 1754, when about six hundred French and one hundred Indians under Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers, Jumonville's brother, surrounded Washington's command of almost four hundred British at Fort Necessity; after a day of fighting, the British surrendered and were allowed to march away, and the French burned Fort Necessity on July 4. In 1755 Major General Edward Braddock led about two thousand four hundred British troops, including four hundred colonials, against Fort Duquesne, improving Washington's road of 1754 and extending it to the Monongahela River near present-day Pittsburgh, but on July 9 his army was defeated there by the French and their Indian allies, Braddock was mortally wounded, and he died on July 13 during the retreat.
