Philip Spiess
I'd like to correct myself and also respond further to Tina Preuninger (Hisrich)'s comment about being related, many generations back, to Christopher Gist (post #3306). In post #3323, I called Christopher Gist "an important and well-known early Cincinnatian." He was not.
Rather, Gist was an important and well-known early Ohioan, having died some thirty years before Cincinnati was ever founded (1706-1759). As a British citizen of the American colonies (he was born in Baltimore), Gist is famous as a surveyor and American frontiersman, being one of the first Europeans to explore the so-called Ohio Country (i.e., the Old Northwest Territory). Having received training as a youth in surveying, possibly from his father, that became his career. By 1750 he had settled as an adult in North Carolina, where he was a neighbor of Daniel Boone.
In 1750 the Ohio Company hired Gist to explore the area around the Ohio River as far as the falls of the Ohio (now Louisville, Kentucky). The Ohio Company had been formed by several wealthy Virginia families, including relatives of George Washington, to purchase land from the king in order to sell it to settlers moving westward. Gist provided one of the first and most detailed descriptions of southern Ohio and northeastern Kentucky that existed at that time. In the process of doing so, he established good relations with the Native Americans of the region (Shawnees and Miamis, among others).
But his actvities and those of the Ohio Company alarmed the French, who were settling into the Great Lakes and Mississippi River regions, and who claimed the Ohio Country for their own. In 1753 they moved troops into the area and established several forts in western Pennsylvania. Thereupon Governor Dinwiddie of the Virginia colony sent George Washington and Christopher Gist to Fort Le Boeuf to convince the French to evacuate the Ohio Country. Did it work? You bet it didn't! Instead, the whole situation precipitated the French and Indian Wars, which raged through the area from 1754 to 1763. But during the trip Gist twice saved Washington's life, first from an assault by a Native American, and second, by pulling Washington from the Allegheny River after he'd fallen off a raft.
As many of you no doubt know, the French built a major fort, Fort Duquesne, at the headwaters of the Ohio River (now Pittsburgh), while Washington built a fort for Virginians, Fort Necessity, in what is now western Pennsylvania. The stories of British General Braddock's defeat (1755) and his death at the hands of the French (with Washington having to take over command), the surrender of Fort Necessity to the French, and the ultimate victory going to the British for control of this portion of the American continent are well known. Christopher Gist himself owned land near what is now Uniontown, Pennsylvania (not too far from Fort Necessity and the site of Braddock's Defeat), and began to build a town there, but the French burned all of the buildings.
Gist had been a member of the Braddock Expedition, along with Washington, and after the defeat he traveled into Tennessee, meeting with various Native American groups to enlist their help on the side of the British during the war. It is unclear where he was during the final years of the war, nor which colony he died in, but he apparently died of smallpox. His fame derives from his early detailed descriptions of the Ohio Country and his close friendship with George Washington.
But wait! There's more! Christopher Gist figures in a current computer game called "Assassin's Creed: Rogue," which apparently has a Masonic Order complexion to it. Now I'm not very familiar with computer games of this ilk, so I'll just give you what I can fathom of it, its gist, as it were. According to an on-line description, it is "an open-world action adventure game, released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2014, and in 2015 for the PC." "Rogue" follows the story of the Assassin [Dale Gieringer take note: as you know, the words "assassin" and "hashish" are historically related] Shay Cormac, now turned Templar [don't even get me started on the history of the Templars!], who, between 1752 and 1760 is involved in the European Seven Years' War -- in America, the French and Indian Wars. Christopher Gist, it seems, was a Mason (don't know if this is true), a latter-day growth off the old medieval Templar stem (as were the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, etc.). This is as far as I myself am going to take this (just a reporter here); the rest of you can do what you like with it.
And, oh, by the way, Happy New Year, Tina!
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