The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  As with its deal with Virginia years earlier, and with the Lenape’s Walking Purchase bargain before that, what the league thought it was selling and what the lines on the deed map showed were two different things. The purchase included about seven million acres west to the current border of Ohio and Pennsylvania and including the west branch of the Susquehanna—a prime and treasured hunting ground that the Iroquois thought they had specifically excluded from the negotiations. When, a few months later, Weiser marked off the line and they saw where it ran, Shikellamy’s sons were outraged, and other Indians along the west branch pledged violence if any whites tried to settle the region. (To his credit, though with little immediate effect, Weiser backed their protests over the boundary.)

  And once again, those most directly affected by the sale—the Lenape and other Ohio Indians—had been shut out of the negotiations. The province and the league had once more ignored the western villages like the “children” Iroquois sachems often called them in council. All this makes Hendrick’s address to the Pennsylvania commissioners at Albany—one famous today for its prescience and its poignancy—a speech soaked in unintended irony.

  With seventy of his fellow sachems listening, the old Mohawk spoke:

  What We are now going to say is a Matter of great Moment, which We desire you to remember as long as the Sun and Moon lasts . . . After We have sold our Land We in a little time have nothing to Shew for it; but it is not so with You, Your Grandchildren will get something from it as long as the World stands; our Grandchildren will . . . say We were Fools for selling so much land for so small a matter, and curse Us; therefore let it be a Part of the present Agreement that We shall treat one another as Brethren to the latest Generation, even after We shall not have left a Foot of Land.

  In the baroque language of frontier diplomacy, Hendrick was speaking of some distant future, but to the Ohio Indians—especially the Lenape, who had been down this road a few times before—the moment when they would “not have left a Foot of Land” loomed closer than ever.

  While they were busily selling the Ohio tribes down the river, the province and the league also used the Pennsylvania deed to pull a mutually bothersome thorn—Andrew Montour and his Juniata settlements. “Andrew Montour had already sold some of the Land on Sherman’s Creek or Juniata . . . and had settled several Others upon it as his Tenants,” Weiser had informed the Iroquois that spring, to their shared displeasure. The white and Indian tenants who were flocking to Montour’s incipient fiefdom west of the Susquehanna would be effectively beyond the authority of both the Six Nations and the province—but not if Pennsylvania bought the land from the league and sold it, free of legal encumbrance, to white farmers who owed their allegiance (and their payments) to the Penns.

  Each for its own reasons, Pennsylvania and the Iroquois League had good reasons to fear the kind of mixed society Montour was forming in the Pennsylvania backwoods, beholden to no one. Better to keep the line bright and sharp—Indian as Indian, white as white. Even as Montour and his eighteen scouts were slipping through the woods along the Monongahela, shadowing the French columns marching toward Fort Necessity, Weiser and the Iroquois quietly but efficiently crushed his dream of becoming lord of a polyglot, polyethnic frontier sanctuary for “the lower sort of People.”

  When he found out what his former mentor Conrad Weiser had done, French Andrew got murderously and piteously drunk. “He is vexed at the new purchase,” Weiser confided to his old colleague Richard Peters, having met Montour at Aughwick two months after the congress.

  He abused me very much, Corsed & swore, and asked pardon when he got sober, did the same again when he was drunk, again damned me more than [a] hundred times . . . Told me I cheated the Indians. He says he will now kill any white men that will pretend to setle on his Creek . . . saying that he was a Warrior—how could he suffer the Irish to encroach upon him—he would now act according to advice, and kill some of them. I reprimanded him when sober. He begged pardon, desired me not to mention it to you, but did the same again at another drunken frolik. I left him drunk at Achwick, on one legg he had a stocking and no shoe, on the other a shoe and no stocking.

  But Weiser had other things to worry about. Tanaghrisson, now ailing,16 and Scarouady had not taken news of the Pennsylvania deed to the western lands as well as he’d hoped, and only by invoking the specter of the French coming from the west and New Englanders from the east was he able to cast the purchase in anything like a positive light. Weiser knew that everything hinged on what the Ohio Indians—punching bags for the province and the league for so many years—would do in the months ahead. “What the french and the ohio and other Indians would be to us in time of Warr I leave to you and other Gentlemen to Judge,” he wrote to one correspondent. “I can not think on Such a time but with Terror.”

  Chapter 10

  War Chief, Peace Chief

  For a prisoner, Robert Stobo was doing rather well for himself. Moving easily through the social circles of Quebec and Montreal, he spoke with a basic but ever-growing command of French, showing an elegant leg—his suits edged in gold trim and exhibiting the latest Parisian fashion, his lacy shirts closed at the neck with a diamond hasp—to the coquettish ladies with whom he flirted in turn. He had livres in his pocket and—ever the merchant—had launched a profitable side business of Indian trading, through which he had so ingratiated himself with the Mississauga band of the Ojibwa that they tattooed a tribal symbol on both his thighs, pricked into his skin with needlelike fish bones and Native ink. It was a long way from the mud of Fort Necessity, in many respects.

  After dispatching his surreptitious letters in September 1754, Stobo and Jacob van Braam had been handed up the French chain of forts to Lake Erie, resigned to the fact that they were not going to be exchanged anytime soon. From Presque Isle, they were bundled off in huge cargo canoes known as “Montreals,” each propelled by more than a dozen paddlers, along the lakeshore to Niagara, into Lake Ontario, and down the St. Lawrence to Quebec City. The more than eight-hundred-mile journey took about a month, and at its end the hostages were received by the governor-general, the Marquis Duquesne, who renewed their paroles—either having not heard or choosing to dismiss the suspicions regarding Stobo’s role in the leaked map and letter.

  Permitted to move freely between cities, Stobo threw himself into the social whirl. He was, by all accounts, a fairly dashing man, and being the only British officer around must have made him an irresistible curiosity to the young mademoiselles and more worldly madames. Weeks of wilderness travel had rendered his uniform a grimy mess, but he was able to draw on credit to outfit himself with panache, a plumed hat and beaver coat being among his purchases. Once more suitably clothed, he set about learning French.

  “To acquire it was his first study, in which pursuit he was greatly assisted by the ladies, who took great pleasure in hearing him again a child . . . His manner was still open, free and easy, which gained him ready access into all their company,” according to the Memoirs of Major Robert Stobo of the Virginia Regiment, an anonymously written, rather turgid account of Stobo’s adventures, which despite its fawning tone appears to be fairly accurate regarding Stobo’s time in New France.17

  By early 1755, however, Stobo was being identified in the French press as the source of the leak regarding Fort Duquesne. The leash tightened, but still, they were only suspicions, and Stobo was able to continue many of his extracurricular activities (“he still preserved his credit with the ladies”)—until his comfortable confinement ended with a bang.

  Duquesne had been recalled to France, replaced by a new governor, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, who was incensed by reports in English newspapers crowing about Stobo’s letter. Called on the carpet, Stobo admitted what he referred to as a “thoughtless stunt.” Although he was held only briefly in prison before Vaudreuil accepted his apology and restored to him a degree of freedom, his days of ranging the St. Lawrence Valley and the salons of the capital at will were o
ver.

  Worse was in store. Word reached Montreal of a stunning victory over the British along the Ohio River. A general named Braddock and the army he led had been smashed to pieces on the very doorstep of Fort Duquesne. In the rout that followed, the dead general’s own secret papers had been abandoned, and among them was found a map of the fort and the damningly detailed descriptions of its armaments, garrison, and vulnerabilities—in the hand, and under the signature, of one Captain Robert Stobo.

  General Edward Braddock was sixty years old, going to gray and running to flesh. Although he was a veteran of the storied Coldstream Guards, his military pedigree looked more impressive than it really was. Despite forty-five years in the service, Braddock had never actually led troops in battle. His rise through the ranks had occurred almost entirely behind a desk, but he knew the right people.

  Arriving in Virginia in February 1755, he wielded unprecedented power as commander in chief of all British forces in North America. Braddock mapped out a plan to simultaneously hit French bases in the Ohio country, Champlain Valley, Great Lakes, and Nova Scotia, personally leading the assault against Fort Duquesne.

  For the Ohio campaign, he gathered more than two thousand men at Will’s Creek, including two regiments of regular British infantry, the Forty-Fourth and Forty-Eighth of Foot, numbering about twelve hundred soldiers—rigid ranks neatly squared off for review in their hot, sweat-stained, red wool jackets, white leggings, and neck stocks, their hair powdered with flour that grew sticky in the humid summer air. Companies of grenadiers, their black miter caps towering above the tricorn hats of the common soldiers, bore themselves with visible élan. Although they no longer carried grenades, grenadiers were the elite foot soldiers, expected to tackle the most dangerous assaults.

  The grenadiers looked down on the run-of-the-mill privates, and the British regulars all looked askance at the independent companies, including the Third South Carolina, which had been bloodied at Great Meadows and was seeking a measure of revenge. The red-coated Carolinians held themselves aloof from the blue-coated provincial companies from Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, and everyone seemed to despise the Third and Fourth New York, two independent regular companies wearing green-faced jackets. The Yorkers had been so late in reinforcing Washington the previous year that Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie had publicly hung the blame for the loss on them. They remained poorly equipped and even less well led. So many of them were “men from sixty to seventy years of age, lame and in everyway disabled,” that it was hard to see them as a serious cog in the military juggernaut Braddock was assembling.

  The Yorkers had, like the Carolinians and Marylanders, overwintered at Will’s Creek, helping to build Fort Cumberland, a dramatic expansion over the small Ohio Company compound that had previously occupied the site. Forty yards on a side, with four corner bastions mounting heavy cannons, the fort sat on a high bluff overlooking the confluence of the creek and the north fork of the Potomac River, connected to a rectangular stockade two hundred yards long that enclosed housing for hundreds of troops and masses of provisions and equipment. Virginia pledged to supply eleven hundred cattle and Pennsylvania tons of flour. A thousand barrels of salt-cured beef were unloaded from the troop transports and hauled to Will’s Creek, to which hundreds of hogs were likewise driven for slaughter, the smokehouses there packed with slabs of bacon. In all, it was reckoned, the promised supplies were sufficient to feed four thousand men for six months.

  Any army is more than fighting men, and Braddock’s retinue included not only the soldiers and officers but also companies of so-called pioneers—axmen, directed by engineers, who would clear the road for troops and wagons; a guard of light horsemen; a company of scouts; and even thirty seamen and officers from the HMS Centurion, handy with ropes, to string bridges across the rivers of the Ohio country. There were surgeons, quartermasters, blacksmiths, and a chaplain. There were muleskinners and drivers to handle the 150 wagons and 500 horses supplied by Benjamin Franklin. Among the wagoners was a nineteen-year-old from the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina named Daniel Boone, whose family had moved from the Tulpehocken Valley just a few years earlier. It was from one of George Croghan’s traders, another Scots-Irishman named John Findley, that young Boone first heard of Kentucky.

  An eighteenth-century army also carried with it an unavoidable train of women—not only whores and camp followers, but respectable washerwomen, nurses, wives, and sweethearts. “I do hereby Certifie that the Bearers . . . are wives to Soldiers belonging to the Forces under my Command; And all persons whatsoever are hereby requir’d to suffer ’em to pass without hindrance or molestation,” read a pass issued by Braddock to twenty-eight women departing the fort. Braddock was less solicitous of some of the Indian women at Cumberland, who would trade favors for money from “the Officers, who were scandalously fond of them”; he ordered them driven away. He likewise had no patience with English women who refused to serve as nurses in exchange for their meals and sixpence a day, threatening to turn them out of the installation.

  Among the women gathering at Fort Cumberland was Charlotte Brown, widowed sister of one of Braddock’s officers and matron of the general hospital—the woman who would oversee treatment of the sick and wounded. She and her brother had made the four-month Atlantic crossing the previous winter and by early June were traveling with a detachment of forty men to join the army at Fort Cumberland. She slept rough most nights, confiding to her diary, “My Lodgings not being very clean, I had so many close Companions call’d Ticks that depriv’d me of my Night’s Rest.” She moved on the army’s wearisome schedule: “At 2 in the Morning the Drum beat . . . Being very sleepy we march’d but there is no describing the badness of the Roads.” She ate passenger pigeons that her companions shot for dinner; tippled a little peach whiskey, given to her by an elderly Quaker couple; and stayed for the night at “a Rattle snake Colonels nam’d Crisop”—Thomas Cresap, the “Maryland Monster.”18

  Not until mid-June did Brown reach Fort Cumberland, to find that Braddock had marched his men out a few days earlier. She and the nurses for whom she was responsible would await their return in what Brown described as “the most desolate Place I ever saw . . . For Quarters I was put into a Hole that I could see day light through every Log and 1 port Hole for a Window which is as good a Room as any in the Fort.”

  Riding with Braddock was George Washington, again in the uniform of a Virginia colonel. “I wish for nothing more earnestly than to attain a small degree of knowledge in the Military Art,” he had written to Braddock’s aide in March, accepting the general’s invitation to serve as a volunteer on his personal staff, since “a more favourable opportunity cannot be wished than serving under a Gentleman of his Excellencys known ability and experience.”

  Actually, Braddock’s judgment and temperament had long been questioned. He had a reputation as a harsh commander and severe disciplinarian, all spit-and-polish drill that had never been tested. His frustration with the colonials was searing. He thought their regiments all but useless, considered Cresap and other frontier traders with whom he dealt as little more than thieves, and was unable to safeguard even his men’s horses, which wandered off (or were stolen) despite hobbles, pickets, and guards. “None of these were a security against the wildness of the country and the knavery of the people we were obliged to employ,” complained Captain Robert Orme, another of Braddock’s aides-de-camp.

  Braddock considered the provincial assemblies a parcel of shortsighted tightwads. Robert Dinwiddie was inclined to agree, at least to a point. “[I] am sorry to acquaint You that our Assembly will not pay any Money for the Subsistence of any Troops but those on our Establishment,” the Virginia governor wrote Braddock in May. “The Backwardness of some and the refusal of others gives me very up hill Work with my Assembly, and I still doubt if they can be bro’t to grant any further Supplies.”

  George Croghan had his own ideas of what constituted backwardness, and he saw enough of it to feel a growing sense of
alarm at how the assault on Fort Duquesne was being executed. Earlier that spring, tasked with marking a road through the mountains along which Braddock’s army was to march, Croghan arrived at Fort Cumberland to report the survey’s completion. There he was castigated by a furious Sir John St. Clair, Braddock’s deputy quartermaster general, because the route was not already cut and cleared.

  St. Clair “stormed like a Lyon Rampant,” an alarmed Croghan wrote to Governor Robert Hunter Morris in Philadelphia. The man was so angry—preparations for the attack were already months late—that he threatened to ignore the French and instead march the troops into the back settlements of Pennsylvania and “by Fire and Sword oblige the Inhabitants to [cut the road], and take every Man who refused[,] . . . that he would kill all kind of Cattle and carry away the Horses, burn the Houses, & etc., and that if the French defeated them by the Delays of this Province that he would with his Sword drawn pass thro’ . . . and treat the Inhabitants as a Parcel of Traitors to his Master.”

  It wasn’t only Braddock’s underlings who were throwing their weight around. As the first military commander in chief to be placed over civilian authority in the colonies, the general was disdainful of provincial leaders as well. “He shall take due Care to burthen those Colonies the most that shew the least Loyalty to his Majesty, and lets them know that he is determined to obtain by unpleasant Methods what is their Duty to contribute with the utmost Chearfulness,” warned Edward Shippen IV, writing to his father, a prominent Pennsylvania merchant. While it was true that the provinces seemed incapable of taking any concerted action in their own defense, Braddock’s imperious manner, and the shadow of an ironfisted royal rule that his words cast, were already rubbing the prickly, independent colonials the wrong way.