Existing comment:
Céloron plate
This lead plaque was placed at the junction of the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers in 1749 by Captain Pierre Joseph Céloron de Blainville. Five other plates were laid along other tributaries of the Ohio River to assert France's claims to all the lands watered by those rivers. Under its 1609 charter, Virginia claimed those lands, too. News of the lead plates reached Williamsburg and young George Washington was sent west to expel the French. This is the only plaque that survives intact.
Our most significant artifact?
In 1749, on orders from the governor of New France (Canada) at Quebec, Pierre Joseph Celeron de Blainville laid lead tablets along the Ohio River at the junctions with its tributary rivers. This one, the only one to survive intact, was laid at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha rivers, now in West Virginia.
Indians sent news of the tablets to Williamsburg, where Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie gave orders to a twenty-one-year-old with no military experience, George Washington, to tell the French to get out of the Ohio Country, which Virginia claimed. When they did not leave, Washington was sent a second time, with troops. Blood was spilled, beginning the French and Indian War of 1754. The conflict between Great Britain and France spread to Europe, India, and the high seas and was known as The Seven Years War (1756-63). In London, Horace Walpole wrote that "a volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire."
French surrendered Canada and all its claims to North America in 1763. The future of the continent would be largely Anglo-American. More than a century later, Germany's famous chancellor Otto von Bismarck said that the most important geopolitical fact in the world was that Americans spoke English. |