The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  As counterproductive as such highhandedness was with the colonials, Croghan and the other experienced backwoodsmen knew that Braddock’s attitude toward their Indian allies bordered on suicidal. Croghan and Andrew Montour were on the payroll, their job being to secure the Native scouts and auxiliaries without whom frontier fighting was impossible. In May, Croghan brought Scarouady and fifty others down from Aughwick to meet with the general. With Tanaghrisson’s death the previous fall, the Oneida was now the “half-king,” the Iroquois League’s main representative among the Ohio Indians.

  Tutored by Croghan and Montour, Braddock began the council in good form, wiping away the Six Nations’ tears over the death of Tanaghrisson with the requisite gifts, but neither he nor his staff had the slightest interest in listening to advice from Scarouady or any other savage. What’s more, they instructed the warriors on proper tactics and humane behavior; no scalping would be tolerated, for instance.

  One of the Ohio Delawares, the sachem named Shingas, asked Braddock what he intended to do with the land if he drove off the French. “To which Genl. Braddock replied that the English should Inhabit & Inherit the Land,” Shingas later recalled. Shouldn’t the Indians who were friends of the British be able to live there, too, to hunt and trade? the sachem asked. “On which Genl. Braddock said that No Savage Shou’d Inherit the Land.” Shingas and the other Ohioans were so baffled by this answer that they returned the next morning, saying that “if they might not have Liberty To Live on the Land they wou’d not Fight for it[.] To which Genl. Braddock answered that he did not need their Help.”

  The Indians were not happy with what they were hearing. “Mr. [Richard] Peters related . . . that he found Scarouady, Andrew Montour, and about Forty of our Indians from Aucquick, at the Camp with their Wives and Families, who were extremely dissatisfied at not being consulted with by the General,” the Pennsylvania council noted. When Braddock ordered the women and children sent away, most of the men left, too, so that by the time the army marched a month later, all but eight or nine of the warriors were gone. Croghan had sent wampum to the Miami, to no avail, and several hundred Cherokees and Catawbas, who had actually started north to join the attack, had been waylaid by an English trader and convinced to go home. The lack of Indian support was a colossal setback.

  William Shirley, Braddock’s secretary (and the son of the Massachusetts governor by the same name leading the campaign against Fort Niagara), saw plenty to trouble him. He had privately shared his doubts about Braddock’s character and abilities, and when the general’s staff pulled out of Cumberland with the final companies on June 10, his premonitions of disaster were strong. “The Truth is I have many things that give me much uneasiness, which I had rather tell you than write to you, and which put me almost beyond my Stock of patience,” he admitted to his father’s friend Governor Morris. “On Monday we move from this place with 200 Waggons: How we shall get that Number over Such Roads & thro’ such weather as we have had for some time past I know not.”

  Neither the heat and summer storms nor the miserable muddy road—which so slowed the wagons that Braddock ordered all the heavy baggage and a third of the troops left behind, to catch up as they might—was the real problem. Moving across the mountains with thirteen hundred of the best men, Braddock plunged deeper and deeper into the forests of the Ohio country for the next twenty days with only a handful of Indian and white scouts. His army was all but blind, and French-allied Indians picked off any stragglers.

  Of the few Indians they did have, the British almost lost the most important one. When Scarouady and his son were surrounded by a party of Indians and French, the younger man escaped, but the Oneida sachem was taken captive. The French were in favor of killing him on the spot, but their Indian allies—mostly Ohioans who had known Scarouady for years—threatened to go over to the British side if they did. Instead, they tied Scarouady to a tree and left him for Braddock’s men to rescue. His son was less fortunate. A few days later, British grenadiers, hunting for Indians who had just killed several soldiers, shot him by mistake. Braddock ordered him buried with military honors, uniformed officers standing by as a salute was fired over his grave.

  A few days after that, the broken and demoralized British army was conducting a hurried, secret funeral for Braddock himself, burying him in an unmarked grave over which the retreating wagons rumbled to mask the site. It hadn’t been a planned battle or a prepared ambush. The general’s advance column of about four hundred men, led by the “pioneer” carpenters clearing the road, had just forded the Monongahela six miles from Fort Duquesne with Croghan and his overextended scouts. Their regimental colors were unfurled, and their drum-and-fife corps was playing, when they simply collided with a party of French regulars, Canadian militia, and Indians hurrying to the river in hopes of slowing the final British advance.

  The irony was that a well-led British force of almost any size could have plucked Duquesne like a flower. As Robert Stobo had observed a year earlier, it was undermanned and poorly supplied, its troops now racked by illness. The French commander, Sieur de Contrecoeur, had so little hope of fending off Braddock’s regulars that he had, by some reports, already drawn up articles of capitulation to present to the British general.

  As the shooting by the ford began—the acrid white smoke drifting on the hot breeze, the officers calling out the drill that would keep the musket fire in crisp salvos: (“Make ready! Present! Fire!”)—the French line collapsed. The British shouted “Long live the King!” but the Indians and French quickly regrouped within the cover of the forest. War whoops began ringing through the trees, unnerving the British troops. Croghan, scanning the woods, guessed there were three hundred on the French side. In fact, there were more than three times that many, six hundred of them Hurons, Ottawas, and other northern Indians. The French officers had the presence of mind to flank the confused, milling hordes of redcoats, who acted as though they were on a parade ground.

  Braddock’s Defeat (ca. 1907)

  As Indian and French forces pour fire into British columns on July 9, 1755, General Edward Braddock is hit and Colonel George Washington reaches for his horse’s bridle in a twentieth-century depiction of the battle by the American painter Edwin Willard Deming. (Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 1980)

  Instead of taking cover themselves, the British officers held their ranks in the open of the newly cut road, trying to bring up their cannons, while the French poured musket fire into them. It was child’s play; the French and their Indian allies could hardly miss. The vaunted grenadiers, by contrast, flung their fire from hundreds of yards back, ineffectual and actually dangerous to their comrades farther ahead.

  Braddock famously had four (some said five) horses killed beneath him before he took a musket ball through the arm and into the gut. He was carried, gasping, to a wagon by Washington, Croghan, and Orme. The general tried to snatch up Croghan’s pistols and “die as an old Roman”—by his own hand, on the battlefield—but the trader batted him away.

  “I luckily escaped without a wound, tho’ I had four bullet holes thro’ my Coat, and two Horses shot under me,” Washington wrote to his mother, assuring her that he was fine. Croghan likewise came through without a scratch, but in this they were unusual. Two-thirds of the British troops were killed or wounded, including young Shirley, the dead left on the field to be plundered and scalped. One of those killed was Will Poulson, the lieutenant to whom Stobo had given his sword before surrendering himself at Fort Necessity.

  Those who kept their feet used them, mostly running in panic—the vaunted regulars worst of all, at least according to the mocking colonials. The troops, “chiefly Regular Soldiers[,] . . . were struck with such a panic that they behaved with more cowardice than it is possible to conceive,” Washington wrote.

  Carrying little but their own arms—and many had abandoned even those—the retreating British covered almost fifty miles in the next twenty-four hours. Braddock, lingering for four days, died only about a mile from
the charred remains of Fort Necessity. The rear-guard commander, Colonel Thomas Dunbar, took charge, ignominiously marching the entire force back to Fort Cumberland. “It is not possible to describe the distraction of the poor Women for their Husbands,” Charlotte Brown noted in her diary when word of the defeat reached them. “I pack’d up my Things to send for we expected the Indians every Hour.”

  Among the cannons, muskets, powder, and food salvaged by the French from the fleeing British troops—all of which went a long way toward shoring up Duquesne’s flagging defenses—was Braddock’s personal chest. In it, along with his orders from King George and £1,000 in cash, was found Stobo’s letter and map, which Contrecoeur forwarded to Montreal. Instead of surrendering in shame, Contrecoeur would later receive the Order of Saint-Louis.

  Dunbar, who had fled the field without firing a shot, blamed the defeat on the fact that “General Braddock cou’d not get above eight or nine [Indians] to attend him,” a situation he said had grown out of some unspecified “Mismanagement.” The sachems, however, knew whom to hold accountable. A month after the rout, a delegation of the Six Nations—including Andrew Montour, not as an interpreter but in his role as Sattelihu, an Iroquois councilor—traveled to Philadelphia. Montour and Scarouady had seen firsthand what had gone wrong at the Monongahela, and they placed the blame squarely on Braddock. “It was the pride and ignorance of that great General that came from England,” Scarouady said, with Conrad Weiser translating his words. “He is now dead; but he was a bad man when he was alive; he looked upon us as dogs, and would never hear any thing what was said to him. We often endeavoured to advise him and to tell him of the danger he was in with his Soldiers; but he never appeared pleased with us, & that was the reason that a great many of our Warriors left him & would not be under his Command.”

  Holding a string of wampum to reinforce his words, the Oneida sachem continued. “But let us unite our Strength. You are very numerous, & all the English Governors along your Sea Shore can raise men enough; don’t let those that come from over the great Sea be concerned any more; they are unfit to fight in the Woods. Let us go ourselves, we that came out of this Ground, We may be assured to conquer the French.”

  If Scarouady thought so, he was one of the few. The Ohio Indians he had for so long tried to “govern,” the Lenape and Shawnee in particular, drew from the Braddock debacle a very different lesson. The promises of aid and arms with which to fight the French had proved as empty as William Penn’s pledge of faithfulness and honesty in the hands of his sons. It was time not only to abandon the British but to make them pay a price.

  The “back inhabitants” of Pennsylvania had been jittery since the battle at Great Meadows, pleading for protection and support. “We are now in most imminent Danger by a powerful Army of cruel, merciless, and inhuman Enemies, by whom our Lives, Liberties, [and] Estates . . . are in the utmost Danger of dreadful Destruction,” settlers in the Cumberland Valley wrote to provincial leaders in Philadelphia. Through the summer of 1755, sporadic attacks occurred on the edge of the Ohio country, but the long-feared stroke finally fell in October.

  George Croghan had a whiff of the looming trouble. An Indian just back from the Ohio told him that 160 warriors who had been harassing settlements on the upper Potomac were moving north, quietly gathering support among the Indians who lived in the Susquehanna Valley. “He desires me as soon as I see the Indians remove from Sasquehanna back to Ohio to shift my quarters, for he says that the French will, if possible, lay all the back frontiers in ruins this Winter,” Croghan wrote from Aughwick, which his men were busily stockading.

  Just two weeks later, a series of coordinated attacks hit the Susquehanna and northern Potomac valleys, starting on October 16 at Penn’s Creek, a Swiss and German community. “The Enemy came down upon said Creek and killed, scalped & carried away all the Men, Women & Children, amounting to 25 Persons,” the Penn’s Creek survivors wrote to Morris. “We found but 13 which were men and elderly women, & one Child of two weeks old, the rest being young Women & Children we suppose to be carried away Prisoners; the House . . . we found burnt up, and the man of it named Jacob King, a Swissar, lying just by it . . . barbarously burnt and two Tomhawks sticking in his forehead.” For gruesome emphasis, the message to the governor was accompanied by one of the hatchets pulled from Jacob King’s head.

  War parties seemed to be everywhere, killing and capturing scores. They struck the Juniata and Conococheague valleys. Many settlers fled, while a few tried to fort up with neighbors for protection. (A few even took the opportunity to rifle the homes of their absent fellows.) John Harris Jr. and a burial party—having ignored advice from a war-painted Andrew Montour to avoid the west side of the Susquehanna—were ambushed, losing four men to hostile fire. Once home, Harris cut loopholes in the walls of his trading house through which he could shoot. Montour, Shikellamy’s sons, and other Indians living at Shamokin scoured the woods for the attackers. This was shaping up to be a civil war, Lenape and Shawnee against Lenape and Shawnee, yet many were still willing to fight alongside Brother Onas.

  “If the white people will come up to Shamokin and assist they will stand the French and fight them,” Weiser wrote urgently to Governor Morris, conveying information gathered by his sons. “They said that now they want to see their Brethren’s faces, and well armed with smooth Guns . . . they are extremely concerned for the white people’s running away, and said they could not stand the French alone.”

  He continued, “I pray, good Sir, don’t slight it. The lives of many thousands are in the utmost Danger. It is no false alarm.” Indeed, before the sealing wax had fully hardened on Weiser’s letter, a messenger brought him news of still more raids, still more deaths.

  Massacre of Conococheague

  An engraving from the 1883 book The Romance and Tragedy of Pioneer Life depicts an Indian attack on the Pennsylvania frontier during the Seven Years’ War. Melodrama aside, the specter of lightning raids by Indian and French war parties had exactly the intended effect—emptying much of the frontier and spreading terror among the remaining inhabitants. (Library of Congress LC-USZ62-727)

  The attacks continued through the fall. “There is two-thirds of the Inhabitants of this Valley who hath already fled, leaving their Plantations,” the sheriff of the Conococheague Valley wrote to Richard Peters. “Last night I had a Family of upwards of an hundred of Women and Children who fled for Succor. You cannot form no just Idea of the Distressed & Distracted Condition of our Inhabitants.” Of ninety-three people living in the valley known as Great Cove, almost half were killed or taken.

  Behind this sweep into the Susquehanna was the Lenape leader Shingas—“Shingas the Terrible,” as the Pennsylvanians came to call him. This was the sachem who had listened in disbelief as Braddock said, “No Savage Shou’d Inherit the Land”—a story Shingas told to one of his captives that autumn. Shingas, whose name means “bog meadow” in Lenape, came from a remarkable family. His uncle was the late Sassoonan, the sachem who had been so angered by the loss of the Tulpehocken Valley to the Palatines, and his brothers were the noted chiefs Tamaqua (“the Beaver”) and Pisquetomen. All three had abandoned eastern Pennsylvania in favor of the Ohio country, where in 1752 at Logstown, Tanaghrisson had raised Shingas to be “king” of the Ohio Delaware—a bit of self-serving political theater by the Iroquois League, since Shingas and his brothers were already an acknowledged force among the western Lenape.

  Although Shingas was not a physically imposing man, no one questioned his status as a forceful and effective war chief. For the next three years, he led repeated forays by Lenape, Mingo, and Shawnee fighters, terrorizing the Pennsylvania backcountry. (The entry of the Delaware and Mingo into the fight brought fierce satisfaction to the Shawnee, who had already been fighting the British on their own for more than a year, avenging a leading chief who had died while in a South Carolina prison.)

  Shingas wasn’t the only war leader among the Ohio Indians. Pisquetomen struck some of the first blows th
at October, and Tamaqua also proved to be a canny commander. So did the Delaware known by the nickname Captain Jacobs, who had been among those who routed Braddock. Shingas and Captain Jacobs both soon carried bounties of 350 Pennsylvania dollars on their heads. But Shingas became the infamous symbol of the western raiders, in part because of his curiously paradoxical nature. He was ruthless in the field, but his captives often spoke gratefully of his care and solicitation after they were taken.

  Charles Stuart, who with his wife and two children were among dozens of colonists taken prisoner in October 1755, was singled out with another man to be tortured to death. “First our Fingers were To be Cut off and we were To Be Forced to eat them, then our eyes pulled out which we were also to Eat, after which we were To Be Put on a Scaffold and Burnt.” But Shingas overruled the other raiders, noting that Indians “Frequently Called at [Stuart’s] House . . . and had Always been supplied with Provissions and what wanted Both for Themselves & Creatures without Ever Chargeing them Anything.”

  One often-cited story probably says more about the general Algonquian view of adoption, however, than about Shingas’s personal character. The Moravian missionary the Reverend John Heckewelder recalled an occasion when, observing two white boys playing with Shingas’s children, he referred to the boys as prisoners. “[Shingas] said, ‘When I first took them, they were such; but now they and my children eat their food from the same bowl or dish,’ which was the equivalent of saying they were in all respects on an equal footing with his own children, or alike as dear to him.”

  The Ohio Indian attacks meshed neatly with French strategy, which military commanders today would call asymmetric warfare, and which the French had dubbed la petite guerre—hit-and-run attacks by Indians and French troupes de la marine designed to terrify and dislodge the inhabitants of the countryside, putting pressure on provincial political leaders, while avoiding battlefield confrontations. On the map, New France dwarfed its British neighbor—the French colony, after all, extended from New Orleans north to the Gaspé and west to the Missouri River and Grand Portage. The British settlements still hugged the Atlantic coast, rarely extending more than a couple of hundred miles inland. But whereas the French were thinly spread out—trading posts and forts isolated amid millions of square miles—the British colonies were jammed with city dwellers and farmers, backed by far more troops than France could muster. Thus Indian allies became critical.