The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  By mid-April, Fort Prince George, as Trent called it, still wasn’t much to look at—a partially completed log stockade enclosing a single building. Washington and his 150 ill-clothed, ill-equipped colonial militia were en route from Virginia when a message from Trent reached them at Will’s Creek “demanding a Reinforcement with all Speed, as he hourly expected a Body of Eight Hundred French.” It was already too late. A few days earlier, on April 17, with Trent off fetching more supplies and the garrison under the command of Croghan’s half brother, Edward Ward, a veritable French armada had rounded the bend of the river.

  Sixty flatboats, which the French called bateaux, and three hundred canoes beached at the Forks of the Ohio, disgorging more than a thousand soldiers, Canadian militia, and Indians, as well as eighteen pieces of artillery, including heavy nine-pounders. Ward had just forty-one men, most of them laborers, and nothing more potent than rifles. After hemming and hawing for a day, he accepted the inevitable. “Mr. Ward . . . having no Cannon to make a proper defense, was obliged to surrender,” Washington wrote. “They suffered him to draw off his Men, Arms, and Working Tools, and gave Leave that he might retreat to the Inhabitants.” Demolishing the half-finished walls, the French began building the wide, heavy earth-and-wood breastworks of what they dubbed Fort Duquesne.

  The frontier was smoldering, and the Pennsylvania assembly still did little but dither, questioning whether the Allegheny and Monongahela were even in the old Penn land grant. Hamilton couldn’t budge the Quaker bloc from its refusal to arm the Indians, which mystified Dinwiddie. “Whatever may be their religious Scruples, I think they should consider the first Laws of Nature Self-Preservation, and not remain inactive when likely to be invaded by the common Enemy,” he told Hamilton.

  Croghan was also driven to distraction by Philadelphia’s inertia. Tanaghrisson was pressuring him for arms and ammunition, without which the Shawnee were likely to go over to the French. Indeed, the whole situation appeared increasingly sinister to the Ohio sachems, who saw the Virginians and French as dogs eyeing the same bone—their land.

  “The whole of ye Ohio Indians Does Nott No what to think, they Imagine by this Government Doing Nothing towards ye Expedition that ye Virginians and ye French Intend to Divide ye Land of Ohio between them,” Croghan warned Hamilton. Without a “hearty Concurrence” by Pennsylvania’s council, which they still trusted, the Indians will believe that Virginia “is only atacking ye French, on Account of Setling ye Lands.” The Iroquois League was increasingly fractious and ineffective, Croghan said, and whatever control they once exercised was gone: “I ashure your honour [the Ohio Indians] will actt for themselves att this time without consulting ye Onondago Councel.” The promises of British assistance that he and Andrew Montour were carrying to the Ohio villages, Croghan said, “I am a fread will Come to leatt.”

  Washington didn’t have enough men or heavy guns for an assault on Fort Duquesne, whose breastworks were already chest-high and rising. But he continued with part of his original mission, cutting a road through the forest from Will’s Creek, following an Indian path about sixty-five miles to the Youghiogheny River, where with reinforcements he could float down the Ohio to the Forks and confront the French. It was slow going—three or four miles a day at most, clearing a path for horses and the rest of the expected artillery. Axes rang through the thick woods of oak and chestnut, although here and there Washington’s men emerged from the shadows into open grasslands between the mountains—one place called Little Meadows and, thirty miles deeper into the Ohio country, the long valley of Great Meadows, or the Flats, whose marshy grasslands were a welcome respite from the gloom of the forest and good forage for the horses and cattle.

  There was little rest. Gist arrived with news that a French detachment under René-Hippolyte Laforce—one of those who had wined and dined Washington at Fort Machault the previous winter—had rifled Gist’s plantation not far away, while Indian scouts dispatched by Tanaghrisson reported a possible French ambush. Washington secured his ammunition and supplies and, hoping to one-up the French, marched forty of his men through a nightlong downpour, in woods so stygian that seven of the militiamen got lost along the way. The forest swallowed up another detachment of forty men, under Captain Peter Hogg, who stumbled off in the wrong direction. After five sopping hours, finding their way almost by feel, Washington’s party reached Tanaghrisson’s camp at daybreak on May 28.

  The French had passed a slightly more comfortable night. Laforce and thirty men under the command of Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de Jumonville, had bivouacked for several days in a hollow just a few miles away, making crude bark shelters to keep off the rain. Jumonville, who came from a military family—his father and all five of his brothers were officers in the colonial regulars—had been sent from Fort Duquesne to find the British column and, if he believed them to be on French soil, present a letter from his commander demanding they leave. Perhaps because he considered himself an envoy—or perhaps from simple carelessness—the thirty-five-year-old ensign posted no sentries and so did not realize that two British scouts had observed the camp and slipped away.

  As the rain continued, the British soldiers and a few of Tanaghrisson’s Indians encircled the French, many of whom were still asleep, the smoke from their breakfast fires filling the air. The British troops tried to dry their muskets and replace their wet priming powder as Washington formed his ranks in the murky half-light. Someone among the French spotted the intruders and shouted warnings, and a gun may have gone off. Washington barked a command, and two volleys of British musket fire ripped into the disorganized French troops.

  “A smart Action ensu’d; their Arms and Ammunition were dry . . . [and] we could not depend on ours,” reported Captain Adam Stephen, who commanded one of Washington’s companies. “Therefore keeping up our Fire, [we] advanced as near we could with fixt Bayonets, and received their Fire.” The whole thing was over in a few minutes. Jumonville and several other Frenchmen fell in the initial barrage, and those who lay injured were quickly killed and scalped by the Indians. Tanaghrisson walked up to the wounded Jumonville and said, “Thou are not dead yet, Father?” He tomahawked the ensign’s skull, dipping his hands into the warm brains before scalping him.

  Washington had just ignited the Seven Years’ War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War, even though it was the last of four “French and Indian wars” dating back to King William’s War in 1689). Spreading from the Ohio country, the conflict would consume France, Britain, and their imperial allies to become the first truly “world war,” scorching Europe, the Caribbean, India, western Africa, and the Philippines, among other theaters of operation. Washington’s initial reaction, though, appears to have been a bit giddy. He wrote a quick letter to his brother John, bragging, “I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me, there is something charming in the sound.” As often happened in those days, the letter was printed widely in newspapers. When King George II, who had led British troops in battle, read it, his reaction dripped scorn: “He would not say so, if he had been used to hear many.”

  Green though he still was, Washington must have realized he was in serious trouble. He had fewer than 170 men and supply lines that snaked hundreds of miles to Virginia, while the French had several thousand soldiers and Indian allies solidly based at three—now four—forts not far away. Sending his French captives, including Laforce, back to Virginia under guard, Washington in three days hurriedly raised what defenses he could, entrenchments and a crude palisade, in the midst of the marshy meadow that he optimistically described to Dinwiddie as “a charming field for an Encounter.”

  The French commander on the Ohio, Claude-Pierre Pécaudy, Sieur de Contrecoeur, was livid. A Canadian survivor of the attack, hobbling into Fort Duquesne on bleeding, shoeless feet, as well as some of the Indians who had been there, said that Jumonville had been cut down while trying, through an interpreter, to read the French demands that the British leave. (Washington called the claim “an a
bsolute Falsehood . . . When they first saw us, they ran to their Arms.”) To Contrecoeur, it was little more than an assassination. Believing the British were marching six thousand men into the Ohio, he readied a retaliatory force to oust Washington and secure the Monongahela Valley before British reinforcements arrived. Just before the French columns marched, Jumonville’s elder brother, Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers, arrived at Duquesne. Shocked by the news of his brother’s death, he asked for, and was given, command of the attack.

  French fears aside, the British had just fifty-five men coming to Washington’s aid, including Captain Robert Stobo and his well-stocked wagon of equipment and provisions. Worse, they had been stuck in Will’s Creek for weeks while their commander shilly-shallied. Only a blistering message from Dinwiddie and direct orders to abandon the wagons and march “with the utmost expedition” finally prodded him into action. Traveling with the tardy column as an interpreter was George Croghan, who before leaving Virginia had agreed to supply fifty thousand pounds of flour and two hundred horses to the expedition. (He had, unfortunately, left the job in the hands of the hapless Edward Ward, who made a botch of it.) With them as well was Andrew Montour, now with a captain’s commission from Virginia, accompanied by eighteen Indian scouts.

  Washington had asked Dinwiddie specifically for Montour, who “would be of singular use to me here at this present, in conversing with the Indians.” Tanaghrisson had come not with a war party, but with twenty-five or thirty Native families, including women and children. The Ohio was becoming a dangerous place for anyone as vocally pro-British as the Iroquois leader. Not only were there rumors that the French were after him, but Tanaghrisson’s standing among the very Shawnee and Lenape he was supposed to be governing had fallen so far as to make the security of the British camp attractive. Tanaghrisson had sent Scarouady, with wampum and fresh French scalps, to Logstown to raise more fighters and to ask for help from the Six Nations, but the Ohio Indians were increasingly chary of British connections.

  Feeding everyone was an even bigger concern for Washington than inconstant allies. That missing flour was desperately needed, as were ammunition and other supplies. “We have been six days without flour, and there is none upon the road for our relief that we know of . . . We have not provisions of any sort in camp to serve us two days,” Washington wrote to Dinwiddie.

  Arriving with the reinforcements on June 9, Croghan and Montour found themselves in another crisis—the erosion of Indian support. It was clear to the sachems that war was building, and as Scarouady would later observe, it was impossible to live in the woods and remain neutral. After years of begging for the protection of a British fort, the Indians had seen the French bring an overwhelming force to the Ohio and the British squander their chances. The bitterness over land frauds such as the Walking Purchase had never really disappeared, and remaining in the British camp now meant abandoning the Ohio country and moving to the crowded settlements farther east. It was easier to back the likely winner—besides, few Natives trusted the Virginians’ motives, believing the sudden interest in the Ohio was merely another ruse to dispossess them of their land. Croghan and Montour, lobbying the Lenapes and Shawnees gathered at Gist’s farm, tried to get them to side with Washington, but their responses were cool and noncommittal. Washington came to suspect that the Indians’ “Intentions toward us were evil,” and after the council, most just melted away. Many would soon be fighting openly with the French.

  Even Tanaghrisson, far more fiercely anti-French than most, sized up Washington and found him wanting. The Virginian was “a good-natured man but had no Experience,” the Seneca leader concluded. He “took upon him[self] to command the Indians as his Slaves,” while accepting no advice from those who actually lived, hunted, and fought on the frontier. “He lay at one Place from one full Moon to the other and made no Fortifications at all but that little thing upon the Meadow,” Tanaghrisson later complained to Conrad Weiser.

  Still chopping away at a road to Gist’s plantation, debating whether to move his main encampment there and create yet another ad hoc fort, and squabbling over command with the captain of the newly arrived company of British regulars from South Carolina, Washington ran out of time. Rangers reported that the French under de Villiers were closing in. Washington tried to retreat, hoping to reach Will’s Creek, but his tired, hungry men moved too slowly, so he fell back to “that little thing upon the Meadow,” the ramshackle stockade that Captain Stobo dubbed Fort Necessity.

  Washington’s, Braddock’s, and Forbes’s Campaigns, 1754–1758

  (Modern boundaries added.)

  In reality, the “fort” was nothing more than a bark-and-skin-covered shelter about fourteen feet square, surrounded by a small circular palisade of logs, sitting in the middle of meadows that were, under the best of circumstances, marshy underfoot. In all, it was perhaps thirty feet in diameter, barely large enough to contain the 284 men. Here they would have to make a stand. Croghan’s promised food had never arrived, just a few loads of meager supplies from Will’s Creek. Weak with hunger, the men followed orders from Stobo, the regimental engineer, digging trenches beyond the stockade walls and felling trees that could provide cover to attackers. Montour, leading his rangers, was away scouting.

  Two days later, late on the morning of July 3, de Villiers reached Great Meadows, having just passed the scavenged bones of his brother and the other dead Frenchmen, killed more than a month earlier and left unburied for the ravens. Once again, it was raining. The British soldiers crouched in cold water in Stobo’s ditches, finding what protection they could, while six hundred French and Canadians, along with about a hundred Indians, pinned them down in a crossfire. Choosing his moment, Washington had two of their swivel guns—small, minimally effective cannons—sweep the field with grapeshot, after which the attackers simply kept more closely to the safety of the trees and picked off the defenders from there. The rain fell harder still, turning the fort into a quagmire.

  There was no way out. “At Night the ffrench Desired to Parley with our People, But Col. Washington refused,” recalled John Shaw, an Irish seaman who had signed on with the Virginia company. Washington smelled a trick; there was no reason for the French to negotiate what they could very easily force. But de Villiers—whose men were themselves short on food and powder, and who feared British reinforcements at any time—wanted the matter closed. The only British officer to speak French was Jacob van Braam, the Dutchman who had accompanied Washington to LeBoeuf the previous winter and now a captain in the Virginia regiment. He met under a flag of truce with de Villiers, who pushed the point, telling Van Braam he was “to be Reinforced in the Morning by four hundred Indians who lay about twelve Miles off; And then it would not be in their power to give Quarters.” The British were asked to think it over during the night, and if they wanted to avoid a massacre, they should not hoist the Union Jack in the morning.

  Van Braam took the written terms of surrender back to his commander; by candlelight, Washington and his officers thrashed out the alternatives. They had more than thirty dead and seventy wounded, a quarter of their strength, and they’d killed only a handful of the French. Their options were few. At dawn, the flagpole was bare and the document had been signed in Washington’s forceful hand.

  By agreeing to the capitulation, Washington was explicitly acknowledging what the document called “la assasain qui a été fait sur on nos officier”—the assassination of Jumonville, a charge that would darken his reputation for years. It seems plausible that, as Washington always maintained, Van Braam (whose French may have been fine but whose English was shaky) orally translated the passages as “the killing of” or “the death of” Jumonville. Be that as it may, Washington’s journal, which the French discovered in the aftermath of the fight, betrays a remarkably defensive conscience about Jumonville’s death. He called the ensign’s mission “a plausible Pretence to discover our Camp, and to obtain the Knowledge of our Forces and our Situation!” and through tortured reasoning he
dismissed any notion that the ensign was a formal envoy: “Instead of coming as an Embassador, publickly, and in an open Manner, they came secretly, and sought after the most hidden Retreats, more like Deserters than Embassadors . . . Besides, an Embassador has princely Attendants; whereas this was only a simple petty French Officer.”

  Of course, much the same case could have been made against a simple militia officer appearing at a French fort, in the middle of the winter, accompanied by a few guides, and quietly counting the cannons. But if Washington was self-aware enough to see the similarities between Jumonville’s mission and his own the previous year, he wasn’t going to admit it, even to himself.

  And while Washington still thought of himself as British and de Villiers as French, they and many of those locked in battle—white and Indian, pureblood and métis, colonial militia and troupes de la marine, Virginians and Carolinians, Pennsylvanians and Canadians, Mingos and Delawares—had been born on the continent on which they were fighting. The motives for looming war may have been international, the goals propelling the armies imperial, but for most of the combatants at Great Meadows, this was home.

  In the morning, drums beating and their muskets shouldered, Washington and his men left Fort Necessity. The ranks of the French-allied Indians had swollen overnight, including many whom the British had lately considered their friends. Private Shaw, marching out among the columns, said that the Indians “could hardly be Restrained . . . from falling on our People,” and the warriors had already pillaged most of the officers’ belongings and killed several of the wounded. The British gave their word—their “parole of Honour”—not to return to the Ohio Valley for one year from that date. It was a far better outcome than the badly outmanned and outgunned colonials had any right to expect.