I'm Angela O'Dell and you are listening to real cool history for kids, a podcast show featuring history stories told from a biblical'm going to start our podcast episode with a story

about one of my very favorite people in American history. I am sure you have heard his name

because he's a very famous American.

In fact, George Washington is often called the father of our country because he was a famous

general in the American Revolution, which we will learn about later, and he was our first

elected president. But did you know that George Washington was also an extremely knowledgeable woodsman. He loved the forest and was known to spend weeks exploring the wilderness on the western border of the British American colonies. He was also familiar with the Native Americans and their ways of life.

There are stories of how George became a land surveyor at the age of 16.

A surveyor is someone who measures land.

To be a surveyor, you have to be, well, you have to have a good head for numbers in mathematics and you also have to be

trustworthy. And George was both of these things. People trusted him to correctly

measure the land which they wanted to sell. At 21 years of age, George was hired by the British

government to keep an eye on what the French were doing. Did I just say the French were doing.

Did I just say the French?

Yes, you heard me right.

During the age of exploration, France had claimed large

portions of land covering a huge area of what is now the middle of our country

all the way up into Canada, our neighbor to the north.

I encourage you to stop here and go take a look at a map of North America.

A large portion of the land that you see west of the Appalachian Mountains from the Gulf of Mexico all the way up into Canada used to belong to the French.

That's a lot of land, isn't it?

Remember, the original 13 colonies were really quite a narrow strip on the east coast of North America.

The French had more land, but the English had more people.

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