George Washington: Original American Badass
streiff
Today is "Presidents' Day," a rather lifeless midwinter holiday that gives some people a three-day holiday and retailers the chance to flog Chinese-made consumer goods at a discount. It wasn't always so. Before 1970, it was Washington's Birthday, in honor of our first president, and, if you'll stick with me through this story, a genuine American badass.
Most (I hope) Americans know he was our first president. More probably know about his false teeth and, now that the destruction of American culture is the thing, that he owned slaves than know about his life. When most people think of George Washington, they think of a rather stiff figure in a wig. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Our first president was a badass in his own right.
At a time when Europeans born in America were about 5 feet 4 inches, George Washington stood 6 feet 3 inches. He was athletic and had a charisma that attracted the attention and admiration of men and women. The scion of minor Tidewater gentry, Washington could've led a comparatively easy life as a planter. But that wasn't his style. He was called to an active life that bordered on the reckless.
At the age of seventeen, he was a licensed surveyor. Family connections got him an appointment as the official surveyor of Culpeper County, VA. In 1750, at age eighteen, he began surveying wilderness tracts across the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Shenandoah Valley. Surveying the Shenandoah Valley was not a trivial undertaking. The Shenandoah was unexplored, and the people who settled there were mostly Irish borderers — or what we now call Scots-Irish to distinguish them from the Irish Catholics who began arriving in the first third of the 19th century — who were not known for docility or paying much attention to the law. Thomas Jefferson lamented, "The wild Irish, who had gotten possession of the valley between the Blue Ridge and North Mountain, forming a barrier over which none ventured to leap, and would still less venture to settle among." They gathered there by choice, flowing down the Cumberland Valley from Pennsylvania, as many of them had reason to prefer to be at a distance from authorities. The British Crown wasn't displeased. They formed a useful barrier between the French and their Indian allies and British settlements east of the Blue Ridge.
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https://redstate.com/streiff/2024/02/19/george-washington-original-badass-n2170314