Painting of George Washington by John Trumbull
Although Washington’s approaching marriage and his landholdings in Virginia would tie him to the East, he would remain a westerner at heart. A year before Daniel Boone moved his family to Kentucky, Washington already had sailed by boat down the Ohio as far as the Great Kanawha to claim lands and millsites granted for his services in the war.
On that voyage he rode gunwale to gunwale at the forefront of the tide of English-speaking men and women sweeping west, to inundate the French populations in the forest clearings, cross the Mississippi, well up the ramp of the sunbright plains, lap across the Shining Mountains and down the western slope to where the sun each day is quenched in what was once the Spanish Sea.
The confluence of the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers. The Ohio River forms the boundary between West Virginia and Ohio.
Bliss Isely, The Horseman of the Shenandoah: A Biographical Account of the Early Days of George Washington (nc: np, nd), pp. 224-225.
Short Stories on Honor, Chivalry, and the World of Nobility—no. 243
