Part 38 (1/2)
There was no improvement. In the next week he writes to Bouquet: ”These four days of constant rain have completely ruined the road. The wagons would cut it up more in an hour than we could repair in a week. I have written to General Abercromby, but have not had one sc.r.a.pe of a pen from him since the beginning of September; so it looks as if we were either forgot or left to our fate.”[663] Wasted and tortured by disease, the perplexed commander was forced to burden himself with a mult.i.tude of details which would else have been neglected, and to do the work of commissary and quartermaster as well as general. ”My time,” he writes, ”is disagreeably spent between business and medicine.”
[Footnote 663: _Forbes to Bouquet, 15 Oct. 1758. Ibid., 25 Oct. 1758.
Forbes to Pitt, 20 Oct. 1758._]
In the beginning of November he was carried to Loyalhannon, where the whole army was then gathered. There was a council of officers, and they resolved to attempt nothing more that season; but, a few days later, three prisoners were brought in who reported the defenceless condition of the French, on which Forbes gave orders to advance again. The wagons and all the artillery, except a few light pieces, were left behind; and on the eighteenth of November twenty-five hundred picked men marched for Fort Duquesne, without tents or baggage, and burdened only with knapsacks and blankets. Was.h.i.+ngton and Colonel Armstrong, of the Pennsylvanians, had opened a way for them by cutting a road to within a day's march of the French fort. On the evening of the twenty-fourth, the detachment encamped among the hills of Turkey Creek; and the men on guard heard at midnight a dull and heavy sound booming over the western woods. Was it a magazine exploded by accident, or were the French blowing up their works? In the morning the march was resumed, a strong advance-guard leading the way. Forbes came next, carried in his litter; and the troops followed in three parallel columns, the Highlanders in the centre under Montgomery, their colonel, and the Royal Americans and provincials on the right and left, under Bouquet and Was.h.i.+ngton.[664]
Thus, guided by the tap of the drum at the head of each column, they moved slowly through the forest, over damp, fallen leaves, crisp with frost, beneath an endless entanglement of bare gray twigs that sighed and moaned in the bleak November wind. It was dusk when they emerged upon the open plain and saw Fort Duquesne before them, with its background of wintry hills beyond the Monongahela and the Alleghany.
During the last three miles they had pa.s.sed the scattered bodies of those slain two months before at the defeat of Grant; and it is said that, as they neared the fort, the Highlanders were goaded to fury at seeing the heads of their slaughtered comrades stuck on poles, round which the kilts were hung derisively, in imitation of petticoats. Their rage was vain; the enemy was gone. Only a few Indians lingered about the place, who reported that the garrison, to the number of four or five hundred, had retreated, some down the Ohio, some overland towards Presquisle, and the rest, with their commander, up the Alleghany to Venango, called by the French, Fort Machault. They had burned the barracks and storehouses, and blown up the fortifications.
[Footnote 664: _Letter from a British Officer in the Expedition, 25 Feb.
1759, Gentleman's Magazine_, XXIX. 171.]
The first care of the victors was to provide defence and shelter for those of their number on whom the dangerous task was to fall of keeping what they had won. A stockade was planted around a cl.u.s.ter of traders'
cabins and soldiers' huts, which Forbes named Pittsburg, in honor of the great minister. It was not till the next autumn that General Stanwix built, hard by, the regular fortified work called Fort Pitt.[665]
Captain West, brother of Benjamin West, the painter, led a detachment of Pennsylvanians, with Indian guides, through the forests of the Monongahela, to search for the bones of those who had fallen under Braddock. In the heart of the savage wood they found them in abundance, gnawed by wolves and foxes, and covered with the dead leaves of four successive autumns. Major Halket, of Forbes' staff, had joined the party; and, with the help of an Indian who was in the fight, he presently found two skeletons lying under a tree. In one of them he recognized, by a peculiarity of the teeth, the remains of his father, Sir Peter Halket, and in the other he believed that he saw the bones of a brother who had fallen at his father's side. The young officer fainted at the sight. The two skeletons were buried together, covered with a Highland plaid, and the Pennsylvanian woodsmen fired a volley over the grave. The rest of the bones were undistinguishable; and, being carefully gathered up, they were all interred in a deep trench dug in the freezing ground.[666]
[Footnote 665: _Stanwix to Pitt, 20 Nov. 1759_.]
[Footnote 666: Galt, _Life of Benjamin West_, I. 64 (ed. 1820).]
The work of the new fort was pushed on apace, and the task of holding it for the winter was a.s.signed to Lieutenant-Colonel Mercer, of the Virginians, with two hundred provincials. The number was far too small.
It was certain that, unless vigorously prevented by a counter attack, the French would gather in early spring from all their nearer western posts, Niagara, Detroit, Presquisle, Le Boeuf, and Venango, to retake the place; but there was no food for a larger garrison, and the risk must be run.
The rest of the troops, with steps quickened by hunger, began their homeward march early in December. ”We would soon make M. de Ligneris s.h.i.+ft his quarters at Venango,” writes Bouquet just after the fort was taken, ”if we only had provisions; but we are scarcely able to maintain ourselves a few days here. After G.o.d, the success of this expedition is entirely due to the General, who, by bringing about the treaty with the Indians at Easton, struck the French a stunning blow, wisely delayed our advance to wait the effects of that treaty, secured all our posts and left nothing to chance, and resisted the urgent solicitation to take Braddock's road, which would have been our destruction. In all his measures he has shown the greatest prudence, firmness, and ability.”[667] No sooner was his work done, than Forbes fell into a state of entire prostration, so that for a time he could neither write a letter nor dictate one. He managed, however, two days after reaching Fort Duquesne, to send Amherst a brief notice of his success, adding: ”I shall leave this place as soon as I am able to stand; but G.o.d knows when I shall reach Philadelphia, if I ever do.”[668] On the way back, a hut with a chimney was built for him at each stopping-place, and on the twenty-eighth of December Major Halket writes from ”Tomahawk Camp:” ”How great was our disappointment, on coming to this ground last night, to find that the chimney was unlaid, no fire made, nor any wood cut that would burn. This distressed the General to the greatest degree, by obliging him after his long journey to sit above two hours without any fire, exposed to a snowstorm, which had very near destroyed him entirely; but with great difficulty, by the a.s.sistance of some cordials, he was brought to.”[669] At length, carried all the way in his litter, he reached Philadelphia, where, after lingering through the winter, he died in March, and was buried with military honors in the chancel of Christ Church.
[Footnote 667: _Bouquet to Chief Justice Allen, 15 Nov. 1758._]
[Footnote 668: _Forbes to Amherst, 26 Nov. 1758._]
[Footnote 669: _Halket to Bouquet, 28 Dec. 1758._]
If his achievement was not brilliant, its solid value was above price.
It opened the Great West to English enterprise, took from France half her savage allies, and relieved the western borders from the scourge of Indian war. From southern New York to North Carolina, the frontier populations had cause to bless the memory of the steadfast and all-enduring soldier.
So ended the campaign of 1758. The centre of the French had held its own triumphantly at Ticonderoga; but their left had been forced back by the capture of Louisbourg, and their right by that of Fort Duquesne, while their entire right wing had been well nigh cut off by the destruction of Fort Frontenac. The outlook was dark. Their own Indians were turning against them. ”They have struck us,” wrote Doreil to the Minister of War; ”they have seized three canoes loaded with furs on Lake Ontario, and murdered the men in them: sad forerunner of what we have to fear!
Peace, Monseigneur, give us peace! Pardon me, but I cannot repeat that word too often.”
NOTE: The _Bouquet and Haldimand Papers_ in the British Museum contain a ma.s.s of curious correspondence of the princ.i.p.al persons engaged in the expedition under Forbes; copies of it all are before me. The Public Record Office, _America and West Indies_, has also furnished much material, including the official letters of Forbes. The _Writings of Was.h.i.+ngton_, the _Archives_ and _Colonial Records_ of Pennsylvania, and the magazines and newspapers of the time may be mentioned among the sources of information, along with a variety of miscellaneous contemporary letters. The Journals of Christian Frederic Post are printed in full in the _Olden Time_ and elsewhere.
Chapter 23
1758, 1759
The Brink of Ruin
”Never was general in a more critical position than I was: G.o.d has delivered me; his be the praise! He gives me health, though I am worn out with labor, fatigue, and miserable dissensions that have determined me to ask for my recall. Heaven grant that I may get it!”