Episode Details

In the spring of 1754, a twenty-two-year-old Virginia lieutenant colonel named George Washington marched a few hundred men into the Ohio wilderness to make good his colony’s claim to a fort the French had already seized — and instead lit the fuse of a world war. This is the story of his first command: the all-night march through the rain to a hidden ravine; the fifteen-minute skirmish at Jumonville Glen; the killing of the wounded French envoy Jumonville by Tanaghrisson, the Half-King, who needed a war and made one with a single stroke of his hatchet; and the rain-soaked disaster at Fort Necessity, where Washington surrendered the only army he would ever surrender and signed his name, in French he could not read, to a confession of “assassination.” From a wet meadow in the Pennsylvania mountains, the spark that — in Horace Walpole’s words — “set the world on fire.”