by Peter Stark
WITH THE SPLITTING OPEN of Jumonville’s skull, chaos quickly spread on the American frontier. A thousand more French forces quickly arrived by canoe at Fort Duquesne, which is what France named its outpost-under-construction at the Forks of the Ohio. Captain Contrecoeur sent out a party under Jumonville’s revenge-minded older brother, Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers, to run down the retreating George Washington. Washington and his exhausted men holed up in a small, crude British outpost, the aptly named Fort Necessity, huddling in muddy trenches in a powder-dampening downpour as the French and their Indian allies showered them with musketballs from the surrounding forest. In the gloomy dusk Coulon de Villiers offered Washington surrender terms—he could take blame for the “assassination” and walk freely out of the Ohio Valley with his troops, pledging not to set foot in it again for a year. Or he and his men could be destroyed.
At midnight on July 3, 1754, Washington accepted the terms in the outpost’s leaky blockhouse.
Daybreak brought the worst of the humiliation. Washington and his fellow Virginians now were able to identify the French allies.
“[W]hat is most severe upon us,” lamented one of Washington’s party, “they were all our own Indians, Shawnesses, Delawares and Mingos.”
The Indians whom the British thought were their allies had switched over to the French.
The buildup led to all-out warfare between the two great empires. By early September, the alarming news of Washington’s humiliation by the French in the wilds of the Ohio Valley had traveled back across the Atlantic to London.
“All North America will be lost17 if These Practices are tolerated,” wrote the aggressively minded Duke of Newcastle, who, through his acquaintance with King George’s son, had the ear of the royal court and convinced it to block the French from building forts in the Ohio Valley.
With King George’s blessing, two infantry regiments set sail from Ireland bound for the wilderness of the Ohio Valley. They were under the command of Major General Edward Braddock, who was also given authority over the ten existing British regiments in North America plus the power to summon up deactivated ones. Braddock, who had trained on the orderly battlefields of Europe and was utterly ignorant about wilderness guerrilla fighting, planned to crush the French not only in their Ohio Valley strongholds, but on three other fronts at the same time—their forts on Lake Ontario and on Lake Champlain, as well as the forts the French had recently built on the peninsula leading to Nova Scotia. This was Acadia, now in British hands, but still heavily French in population.
Braddock’s contempt extended both to Indian warriors and to the fighting ability of American colonial troops—they could not drill with the same precision that the British regulars displayed in London’s Hyde Park.
“[I]t is impossible that [savages] should make any impression” on disciplined British troops, he told Ben Franklin upon arriving in America.
Franklin wasn’t so sure.18
Braddock alienated the Pennsylvania Assembly by calling it “pusillanimous” because its pacifist Quaker members wouldn’t appropriate money for his troops to fight the French.
Nor did he warm to Indian diplomacy. Chief Shingas, the head of the Ohio Delawares, approached Braddock and offered to rally other Ohio Valley tribes to help the British drive the French out of the Ohio Valley. The chief then asked him, “What would the British do with the land once they controlled it?”
Braddock replied, “The English should inhabit19 and inherit the land.”
The chief asked whether the Indians who were friends of the British could live and trade among the British settlers of the Ohio Valley and have hunting grounds there.
“No savage should inherit the land,” answered Braddock.
If the Indians wouldn’t be free to live on the land, Chief Shingas responded, they wouldn’t fight for it.
Braddock answered that he did not need their help and he had “no doubt of driveing the French and their Indians away.”
These Indians led by Shingas, who had been ready to join the British against the French if it meant they were given back their hunting rights in the Ohio Valley, abandoned Braddock in anger and returned from the colonized East to the wilds of the Ohio. Many of them now eagerly sought to go to war on the side of the French, after being so high-handedly rejected by the British in the person of Major General Braddock.
“IF IT HADN’T BEEN LE ROY, it would have been someone else,” Mattern mused as we climbed the wooded ridge overlooking the old Le Roy farmstead.
He swung the shaft of an old golf club, like a riding crop or machete, to knock aside the underbrush, probed around with it at exposed tree roots and amid the excavated dirt piles from gopher holes to turn up Indian artifacts. Occasionally he poked a little more intently at one chip of rock or another. “I see what should be on the site and then block it out and see what shouldn’t be there,” he explained. He reached down and plucked leaves of native plants that the Indians ate: wild strawberry, native garlic, Jacob’s root.
It was Mattern’s belief, derived from written accounts and his knowledge of the local geography, that the Indian raiding party, after attacking the Le Roy and Leininger homesteads, regrouped at the top of this wooded ridge.
“They rendezvoused up here and then headed west,” Mattern told me. “They had done their deed. They had gained their power. That was their belief, they gained power from the enemy. You have to understand that it was more important to take captives and to return home with them, not to kill everyone. They believed in counting coup. Basically, it means hitting your enemy and not getting hit back. Not hitting them with an arrow but striking them with the hand. It was better to scalp them alive than dead. Hair was sacred—you really took power.”
He probed with his golf shaft at the bare soil around some exposed tree roots, and identified the edible plant known as poke.
“The natives believed that everything had spirit or power. A tree growing up through the rock, standing up to the wind, that has power. The bear has power, the wolf has power, the rock has power.
“Everything has power—that’s why so much was sacred to them. Their belief system was so different from ours, and we called them pagans. The English and Dutch didn’t understand the intricacies.”
GENERAL BRADDOCK, SURELY, did not understand the intricacies, nor fathom the deep and ancient Indian attachment to the earth. After telling Chief Shingas that “no savage should inherit the land” and that he didn’t need Shingas’s help to drive the French from the Ohio Valley, Braddock and his column of 2,200 men left Fort Cumberland, Maryland, near the headwaters of the Potomac, in late May 1755. They were marching with purpose toward the new French Fort Duquesne at the Forks of the Ohio, 110 miles away through the wilderness. The British claimed that the French fort had been placed illegally on lands that belonged to the British crown—the entire Ohio Valley. Three hundred light infantry headed the column, backed up by 250 frontiersmen chopping a road through thick forest for the column’s bulk, which included more soldiers, cannons to siege the fort, supply wagons (one driven by Daniel Boone), and a contingent of camp women.20 In addition to seven Mingo (or Iroquois Confederacy) Indian scouts, though no Indian warriors, the column included a large complement of American “provincials”—essentially colonial farmers—who, in Braddock’s view, were of dubious worth compared to his crack British troops.
Making agonizingly slow progress through “uninhabited Wilderness over steep rocky Mountains and almost impassable Morasses” because Braddock had insisted on using wagons instead of pack horses, the column had just forded the Monongahela River early on the afternoon of July 9. It was now within ten miles of Fort Duquesne. The head of the column and scouts started up a draw into the higher terrain that rose on the opposite bank. The soldiers noticed that, instead of the thick underbrush they had been pushing through on the other side of the river, the forest understory here was open and had been burned to encourage grass to grow—a sign the Indians had used these lands recently as hun
ting grounds.
Through the open trees, only two hundred yards away, the British scouts suddenly spotted humans. This, it turned out, was the head of a party of nearly a thousand Indians and Canadian soldiers, sent out from Fort Duquesne by Contrecoeur to intercept the advancing British.
It was with surprise on both sides that the two parties met, but each had a totally different response. Braddock’s British troops lined up in formation in the crude road and began to fire coordinated volleys at the Indians and French Canadians. The first few volleys dropped the French commander, Beaujeu, as he waved his hat to direct his trained troops. The seven hundred Indians with Beaujeu, however, instantly took cover behind trees and in the ravine, lay prone on the ground, and otherwise hid from the volleys, then ducked through the forest to surround the British column.
As the Indians opened fire from their hiding places, the British advance party fell back, running into the main group, which continued to move forward. The column of redcoats was jammed into the road as fire poured in on them from the Indian hiding places. They couldn’t even see where to fire their organized volleys. Virtually all the British officers in the advance column were wiped out in the first ten minutes. The American forces who accompanied the British troops attempted, like the Indians who were attacking them, to hide behind trees. But Braddock, charging ahead from the rear of the column, fiercely urged his British troops and the American provincials to keep formation and fire coordinated and disciplined volleys, which he knew to be effective from the wide-open, chessboardlike battlefields of Europe.
According to one witness, “Whenever he saw a man skulking behind a tree,21 he flew at once to the spot, and, with curses on his cowardice and blows with the flat of his sword, drove him back into the open road.”
The Indians and French shot four horses from under Braddock, while Washington, who’d gone into battle severely weakened by illness, lost two. The fight raged for three hours—lead flying from the woods at the orderly rows of redcoats in the crude road and the unseen Indians sounding to British ears as “ravenous Hell-hounds…yelping and screaming like so many Devils.”
Braddock—perhaps mercifully for his men—finally took a musket ball through the arm and lungs and fell from his horse. No longer forced to stand their ground in formation, his troops fell back toward the river, then broke and fled in terror—running for miles through the woods—as the Indians began scalping the fallen. For decades, a story persisted that Braddock had been shot by one of his own troops22—an American provincial named Thomas Fausett of Pennsylvania. Years later he admitted to cutting down his own general because if he hadn’t, all the men would have been killed.
It was an utter slaughter. Of 1,460 British and American troops that had actually gone into combat, 456 were killed and 421 wounded. Of the 89 commissioned officers, 63 were killed or wounded.
General Braddock, the architect of this disaster which would forever bear the ignominious name Braddock’s Defeat, managed to survive for four days. His men ferried their wounded leader back across the Monongahela, and began the long, stumbling road toward Maryland.
“Who would have thought it?”23 Braddock said quietly, as he lay dying. “We shall better know how to deal with them next time.”
His surviving officers buried Braddock in the center of the crude, muddy path named “Braddock’s Road” that he had pushed through the Pennsylvania wilderness. After interring Braddock under his road, the officers marched the remaining straggling, retreating troops and horses over his freshly dug grave to hide it, fearing that the Indians would desecrate his body.
“He looked upon us as dogs,”24 said Chief Scaroudy, explaining why the Indians had abandoned the British and allied themselves with the French in the battle for the Ohio Valley, “and would never hear anything that was said to him.”
Word quickly spread through the British Empire of Braddock’s crushing defeat in the Ohio Valley. British and French troops already in North America mobilized toward the Great Lakes border area and surrounding uplands and more were dispatched from abroad. These had been hazy regions of possession from the first colonial arrivals in the New World—the French colonized to the north and the British, in much greater numbers, to the south. But where was the line that separated them?
THESE KINDS OF HAZY BORDERLANDS still exist all over the world. Political no-man’s-lands where there is a vacuum of international power, they often occur in rugged, remote regions, in mountainous highlands, and at the headwaters of river systems. The historian Owen Lattimore, writing in the mid-1900s, and referring to places such as Manchuria, Tibet, and Afghanistan, called these regions “storm centers of the world.” In the mid-1750s the wild Ohio Valley, and the mountainous borderlands around it, was the storm’s epicenter.
With Braddock’s Defeat, London and Paris both quickly sent ships westward across the Atlantic, laden with men and supplies. The stakes now clearly had soared: which empire—French or British—would control the North American continent? Three months after Braddock’s Defeat in July 1755, British authorities questioned the loyalties of the French-speaking Acadians to the British crown, summoned them to the church at Grand Pré, locked the doors, read their eviction notice, torched their homes, and loaded them on ships.
Barely a month after the British started the “grand deportation” of the Acadians, the French, using their Indian allies, counterthrusted in Pennsylvania by “carrying terror” to the British settlers. That morning of October 16, 1755, the raiding band of Delaware and Allegheny Indians attacked the Le Roy and Leininger homesteads and captured the children—the first of many Indian raids on settlers of the Pennsylvania frontier, in addition to raids already under way on settlements in Virginia and Maryland. Many of these were led by the Delaware chief Shingas—he who had been rebuffed by Braddock—and the great warrior Captain Jacobs.
It was terror with a very specific purpose.
“Nothing is more calculated to disgust the people of those Colonies25 and make them desire the return of peace” than these random attacks on the settlers’ homesteads, wrote the Marquis de Vaudreuil, the governor-general of French Canada, who had many years’ experience in the North American wilds.
As panic and terror spread on the news of the multiple murders, kidnappings, and scalpings, such as the Le Roy and Leininger families suffered, the British settlers fled the frontier for the safety of the cities. One such haven for traumatized refugees was Philadelphia, sitting at the edge of this great swath of blank terrain.
That tumultuous autumn of 1755, Billy Bartram had begun his fourth year of studies at the prestigious Philadelphia Academy. A poetry-besotted youth of sixteen, Billy surely watched these developments on the frontier with great interest. Despite the wave of Indian-hating that engulfed much of Philadelphia as terror spread, Billy Bartram came to respect—even idolize—Indians.
Billy, writing under the name William Bartram, would eventually be a key player in the intellectual volleys across the Atlantic. While failing at many endeavors—merchant, planter, suitor—he spent years as a starry-eyed wanderer in the American wilderness, far ahead of his time, nearly a century before Thoreau. His book Travels, published in the late 1700s, would deeply influence the Romantic poets coming of age in Britain around 1800, and inspire the love for Wild Nature that later would be absorbed and refined by American wilderness writers—most notably Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. Our vision of wilderness today, in other words, derives in good part from this poetic lost soul, Billy Bartram of Philadelphia, stumbling about in the American woods in the mid-1700s.
This is all the more remarkable because Indians killed Billy’s Quaker grandfather, who emigrated from England to Pennsylvania in 1682 when William Penn founded it as a Quaker colony. Billy’s father, John, was raised by his Philadelphia grandmother and started out as a Quaker farmer, but, falling in with a crowd of young Philadelphia intellectuals that included Ben Franklin, soon displayed prodigious skill as a self-taught botanist.
Botany had just a
rrived as a European science. For centuries, herbalists, “physicks,” and alchemists had studied and cultivated plants for their medicinal benefits. But with the dawning of the “Age of Sail” and global exploration, European ships in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought back exotic plant specimens from distant lands. The invention of the compound microscope in 1590 allowed Robert Hooke to identify the cell structure of plants and Stephen Hales to trace the movement of water in them—the start of experimental plant physiology. The European aristocracy planted botanical gardens on their estates, showcasing rare plants in the manner that today’s wealthy collect expensive works of art.
John Bartram learned how to use a microscope and the Latin plant classification system then being worked out in the 1730s by Linnaeus in Sweden. He was invited to join Ben Franklin’s new “Junto”—a club of young men started in 1727 who met every Friday evening in Philadelphia to debate “morals, politics and natural philosophy” (and provide a handy forum for the drinking songs Franklin liked to invent). Bartram’s farm—really a very shaggy botanical garden—on the banks of the Schuylkill River just outside Philadelphia soon became widely known in scientific circles. European plant collectors commissioned Bartram to travel throughout the colonies—including the Pennsylvania wilderness—to gather new botanical specimens that had never before been seen in Europe.
It was no doubt through the Junto and the worldly Ben Franklin that Bartram received his first exposure to Deism and drifted from pure Quakerism. All those European expeditions around the globe had brought back accounts of religious practices in Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands. Scientists like Isaac Newton and thinkers like Descartes, meanwhile, had demonstrated a universe that operated according to rationalistic principles. Applying this rationalism to religion, European intellectuals now isolated the basic principles that they perceived united all religion—such as belief in a supreme being and that living a virtuous life was the highest form of worship. They shunned the literal word of the Bible, questioned miracles as “proof” of God’s existence, and rejected the Holy Trinity in favor a single divinity.