The Shot That Started a World War

In the spring of seventeen fifty-four, a twenty-two-year-old Virginia militia officer marched forty men through these Pennsylvania woods on a mission that would ignite a global conflict. His name was George Washington, and he had never seen battle.

Washington had been sent by Virginia's lieutenant governor to push back against French troops who were building forts in the Ohio River Valley, land that Britain claimed as its own. Guided by his Mingo ally Tanacharison, Washington located a French patrol of about thirty men camped in a rocky hollow just below this ridge. In the grey dawn of May twenty-eighth, seventeen fifty-four, the Virginia and Mingo forces surrounded the camp.

Within fifteen minutes it was over. Ten Frenchmen lay dead, including their commander, Ensign Joseph Coulon de Jumonville. Twenty-one were taken prisoner, and only one man slipped away to carry the news.

But the killing of Jumonville set off a diplomatic crisis. The French insisted their men were on a diplomatic mission, not a military one, and that Washington had ambushed an ambassador. A document Washington signed after his surrender at Fort Necessity a few weeks later, written in French he could not read, included an admission that Jumonville had been assassinated. France used that word to rally European opinion.

The skirmish here in the Pennsylvania hills triggered a war between Britain and France that spread to five continents. The conflict, known in Europe as the Seven Years' War, reshaped global empires, drove Britain deep into debt, and set the stage for London to tax its American colonies to pay those war bills. In that sense, the shot fired here in this hollow contributed directly to the American Revolution two decades later.

Washington later wrote that he found the sound of whistling bullets charming. After Jumonville Glen, the charm wore off fast. But the lessons he drew from his early defeats shaped the general he would become.