Christopher Gist Quotes
When I came there I found all my family gone, for the Indians had killed five people in the winter near that place, which frightened my wife and family away to Roanoke about 35 miles nearer in among the inhabitants, which I was informed of by an old man I met near the place.
Gist, Christopher. Christopher Gist's Journals with Historical, Geographical and Ethnological Notes and Biographies of His Contemporaries. Edited by William M. Darlington, J. R. Weldin & Co., 1893, p. 68.
He and George Washington were both young officers in this battle.
His idea was to send English people who were vagabonds, paupers, failures, and never do wells to America. These people in England were just “waste”. But in America, the could be apprenticed or become indentured servants, learn skill and they would (and indeed did) become the corps of laborers needed to cut down the trees, beat the hemp (for making rope), gather honey, salt and dry fish, dress raw animal hides, dig the earth for minerals, raise olives and silk, and sort and pack bird feathers. In England they were so desperate that they would work in the difficult conditions of the colonies and would be willing to venture out from the country and culture in which they existed—a major problem in getting colonial workers.
Christopher Gist (1706–1759) was a explorer, surveyor and frontiersman active in Colonial America. He was one of the first white explorers of the Ohio Country (the present-day states of Ohio, eastern Indiana, western Pennsylvania, and northwestern West Virginia). Gist is credited with providing the first detailed description of the Ohio Country to colonists in the Thirteen Colonies. At the outbreak of the French and Indian War, Gist accompanied Colonel George Washington on missions into this wilderness and saved Washington's life on two occasions.
