Forbes began moving his troops forward in the spring of 1758, from Philadelphia to Carlisle and Rays Town. Anticipating that a body of light troops might be sent ahead from Fort Cumberland, Washington in July asked Bouquet to use his influence to get him and his regiment included; “I hope without vanity I may be allowed to say, that from long Intimacy, and scouting in these Woods my Men are as well acquainted with all the Passes and difficulties as any Troops that will be employ’d, and therefore may answer any purpose intended by them, as well as any other Body.”6 Bouquet assured Washington that Forbes depended on him and his regiment and would avail himself of his zeal, experience, and knowledge of the country, and he solicited Washington’s advice about “making an Irruption into the Enemy’s Country with a strong Party.” (Washington advised against it until the army was further advanced.)7
Nevertheless, Bouquet was not ready to defer to Washington’s supposed expertise in dealing with Indians and fighting in Indian country. “It is with the utmost displeasure that I am to inform you, of the unaccountable behavior of your Indians,” he wrote (emphasis added). Clearly, he implied, the Indians had become accustomed to liberal handouts while at Fort Cumberland. They demanded the same treatment when they joined the army at Rays Town, and when Bouquet was unable to give them what they wanted, they caused trouble among the Indians already there and threatened to leave. Washington must do more to ensure that the king’s presents were distributed judicially and equitably among the Indians to prevent such jealousies occurring.8 As Washington began to cut a wagon road between Fort Cumberland and Rays Town, Bouquet dispatched a contingent of Indians to cover his advance and reminded him to send out flanking parties, “as you are perfectly acquainted w[i]th the dangers of a Sudden attac[k].”9 Bouquet knew as well as Washington what had happened to Braddock.
Bouquet and Forbes also declined Washington’s advice—forcefully and repeatedly offered—on the best route for the expedition. In Washington’s opinion, Forbes took the wrong one. Instead of following the road Braddock had blazed from the upper Potomac on the Virginia-Maryland border (which passed close by Washington’s land at Bullskin Creek), Forbes elected to build a road from Rays Town, where Bouquet established his main advance depot, Fort Bedford, and strike due west. That route was shorter by about forty miles but meant the army had to hack its way through one hundred miles of forest and across the Allegheny Mountains.10 Roads had the power to shape the economic and political landscape in eighteenth-century America. Reopening and improving Braddock’s road to the Ohio country would secure opportunities for commerce and settlement for Virginia and the Ohio Company. The alternative route would give Pennsylvania traders a direct path and strengthen Pennsylvania’s claim to the region. Washington consistently opposed and complained about taking the Pennsylvania route. He lobbied Bouquet, harping on the issue; he wrote Lieutenant Governor Francis Fauquier of Virginia, and, in a letter to John Robinson, Speaker of the House of Burgesses, he attacked Forbes and Bouquet as being in cahoots with Pennsylvania. Their conduct he said, was “tempered with something—I don’t care to give a name to—indeed I will go further and say they are d[upe]s or something worse to P-s-v-n [Pennsylvanian] Artifice—to whose selfish views I attribute the miscarriage of this Expedition, for nothing now but a miracle can bring this Campaigne to a happy Issue.”11
Both routes presented challenges. After “an interview with Colonel Washington to find out how he imagines these difficulties can be overcome,” Bouquet told Forbes, “I learned nothing satisfactory. Most of these gentlemen do not know the difference between a party and an army, and find every thing easy which agrees with their ideas, jumping over all the difficulties.”12
Washington continued carping as the army hacked its way ponderously along what he thought was the wrong route. In this campaign he spent more time and energy fighting his commanding officer than he did fighting Indians. Forbes, with good reason, believed his preference for Braddock’s route from the upper Potomac had less to do with sound military strategy than with giving Virginian land speculators, traders, and settlers first access to the Ohio Valley. He got to the bottom of the Virginian’s opposition to the new road when “a very unguarded letter of Col. Washington” fell into his hands. It was, he wrote Bouquet, “a scheme that I think was a shame for any officer to be concerned in.” Washington’s behavior on the issue, he said with some restraint, “was no ways like a Soldier.”13
Unlike Braddock, who pushed ahead to keep on schedule, Forbes constructed storehouses and defensive posts along his line of march and built a road that would supply the British garrison once Fort Duquesne fell.14 The agonizingly slow progress frustrated Washington to no end. “So miserably has this Expedition been managed,” he vented in a letter to Sally Fairfax in late September, that he expected that after another month’s ordeal and the loss of many more men, it would be abandoned for the season.15 But Forbes’s slow and deliberate advance allowed him time to establish supply depots and intermediate forts along the route and advance with strength. It also allowed time for Lieutenant Colonel John Bradstreet to capture Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario, thereby severing French supply lines to the interior and cutting off support for Fort Duquesne and its Indian allies. And it allowed Forbes to recover lost ground with the Indians.
Forbes shared many of Braddock’s attitudes and antipathy toward colonials and Indians. He was disappointed in the forces from Virginia and Pennsylvania, he told William Pitt: with very few exceptions the officers were a bunch of “broken Innkeepers, Horse Jockeys, & Indian traders”; the men were just as bad, “a gathering from the scum of the worst of people, in every Country, who have wrought themselves up, into a panick at the very name of Indians who at the same time are more infamous cowards than any other race of mankind.”16 But Forbes grasped the importance of Indian diplomacy to his campaign. He understood that in the escalating competition for the Ohio country the Indians’ goal was to maintain their independence and keep their homelands intact, and that, as Robert Hunter Morris argued, the French had won over the Delawares and Shawnees under the pretense of restoring their country to them.17 Forbes knew that if they were to be won back and their power neutralized, the British would have to assure them their lands would be protected when the war was over, something that Braddock had refused to do.
The French-Indian alliance was vulnerable. Pitt was injecting money and men into winning the war in America; the Royal Navy’s domination of the Atlantic jeopardized France’s ability to supply Indians, and goods manufactured in the mills and factories of industrializing Britain outmatched French goods in quantity, quality, and price. There were signs early in 1758 that raids on the frontier were abating and the western Indians were shifting in favor of the British.18 And now came Forbes’s army, bigger and better prepared than Braddock’s had been. Although General Abercromby’s frontal assault on Montcalm’s forces at Fort Ticonderoga in July 1758 was repulsed with catastrophic losses, the tide of the war was turning, and the Indians could see it. Their scouts watched as Forbes’s army clawed its way west over the mountains.19 Forbes was on the march, Montcalm wrote in September, and he worried he would have many Indian allies. The Iroquois were receiving presents from the English, he said. “Their hearts are with the latter, and their fears with us.”20
A crucial component of Forbes’s strategy was to win over the Delawares and thereby induce other Indians to abandon the fight for the Ohio.21 Forbes could not, of course, simply go and meet Shingas; he had to proceed with due attention to Native politics and protocol, securing assistance from various quarters to get the peace process in motion. Scarouady, the consistent ally to whom Washington had given his name and who might have helped facilitate the peace process, had died of smallpox in 1757. As a first step, Forbes enlisted the help of Israel Pemberton, head of the Quakers’ Friendly Association, to initiate measures to convene a treaty at Easton in Pennsylvania. It was a complicated business that involved dealing with the governors of Pennsylvania and New Jersey and their co
lonial assemblies as well as the various Indian nations, and that, notably, did not involve Virginia, whose landed interests would not have been likely to countenance any territorial concessions. And, as Sir William Johnson observed, “if they push Peace with one hand and War with another they will have a ticklish & hazardous Part to act.”22
Indian-Indian diplomacy cleared the way for peace. The Six Nations and Susquehanna Delawares mediated with the Ohio nations. The Cherokees, though by now few in number in Forbes’s army, made peace overtures to the Six Nations. Sir William Johnson, who had become accustomed to running British-Indian relations and whom Forbes risked offending by reaching out to the Delawares directly, was crucial in brokering the peace between the Six Nations and Cherokees. Once the Cherokee-Iroquois peace was achieved, messages went to the Ohio nations warning them of dire consequences if they continued to support the French. The prospect of Cherokee and Iroquois power aligned against them was a powerful incentive for Ohio Indians to reconsider their position.23
Forbes believed the Delawares were weary of the war and would be glad to have peace.24 Hearing that the western Delawares might be open to negotiations, the eastern Delaware Teedyuscung acted as go-between. He traveled to Philadelphia and conveyed peace belts between Deputy Governor Denny and the Ohio nations. He met with the Delaware chiefs Shingas and Tamaqua, and in July 1758 escorted their brother Pisquetomen and another headman named Keekyuscung or Ketiuscund to Philadelphia to explore possibilities for peace.25 As usual, intertribal relations complicated the peace process. At one point a party of Cherokees arrived in Philadelphia while Teedyuscung was negotiating with Denny. Their arrival sent Teedyuscung into “a terrible pannick,” and Forbes confessed he was at a loss what to do.26 Fortunately, the Cherokees sent Denny a peace message and wampum belts to assure the friendly Delawares they had no hostile intentions.27
Forbes sent a Moravian missionary named Christian Frederick Post as an envoy to the Indians. Post had lived almost ten years among the Delawares, spoke their language, and had twice married Native wives. (Both converts, they had died in 1747 and 1751.) He undertook three major journeys in 1758, one, accompanied by Charles Thomson, to Wyoming, where he gained information from Teedyuscung about the disposition of Ohio Indians, and two to the Ohio country. In July, escorted by Pisquetomen and carrying a message from the government at Philadelphia, he headed west to the Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingoes. As the historian James Merrell has noted, the Delaware war chief and the German missionary made an unlikely team, and they conducted their mission at great personal danger.28
In August, Post reached the four Delaware towns at Kuskuski on the headwaters of the Beaver River. He noted in his diary that the towns held two hundred warriors, which meant a population of roughly a thousand people. Pisquetomen went ahead with four strings of wampum to announce their arrival, and Tamaqua gave Post a warm welcome. But Post thought the messengers who came to invite him to the Indian towns around Fort Duquesne were “very surly.” He traveled to Fort Duquesne and, with French officers looking on, delivered his message of peace to three hundred Shawnees, Delawares, Mingoes, and Ottawas. Fearing for his life, his companions hurried Post away, but even they were deeply suspicious. Speaking “in a very soft and easy manner,” Shingas asked if the English would hang him, as they had put a price on his head. Post assured him he would be well received, but a Delaware named Shamokin Daniel interrupted him, called him a liar, and accused him of coming only to cheat the Indians out of their land. Back at Kuskuski, Shingas, Tamaqua, Pisquetomen, Delaware George, and other western Delaware chiefs held several conferences with Post. It was, they said, “a matter of great consequence” and required much thought. They were glad to hear the English message of peace, but feared “you intend to drive us away, and settle the country; or else, why do you come and fight in the land that God has given us?” Post assured them that the English intended only to drive away the French, not take the Indians’ land. If that was true, the chiefs said, they would send the French home. But they were skeptical, and they refused to consider returning captives before peace was made; “such an unreasonable demand makes us appear as if we wanted brains,” they said.
It is you that have begun the war, and it is necessary that you hold fast, and be not discouraged in the work of peace. We love you more than you love us; for when we take any prisoners from you, we treat them as our own children. We are poor, and yet we clothe them as well as we can, though you see our children are as naked as at the first. By this you may see that our hearts are better than yours. It is plain that you white people are the cause of this war; why do not you and the French fight in the old country, and on the sea? Why do you come to fight on our land? This makes every body believe, you want to take the land from us by force, and settle it.29
Pisquetomen and Tamaqua belonged to a prominent lineage of Delaware culture brokers. The brothers drew on their influence, their political skills, and the Delawares’ traditional role as intertribal peacemakers to mediate a peace that would end the war in the Ohio country and at the same time preserve Indian autonomy. The Quaker trader James Kenny described Tamaqua by this time as “a steady, quiet middle aged man of a cheerful disposition,” although the Delaware chief was surely grief-stricken by the death of a daughter while the talks were taking place. Acutely aware of the stakes—and risks—of a British victory, Tamaqua told Post that if the British were prepared to recognize that “the land is ours not yours,” the Delawares would ensure that “all Indians from the sunrise to the sunset should join the peace.” Again escorted by Pisquetomen, Post hurried back across the mountains with the news and a Delaware peace belt of eight rows of wampum.30
The peace process gathered momentum, and Sir William Johnson threw his weight behind it. After many intrigues with the Quakers and the governors and governments of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and with Johnson exerting his considerable influence, Forbes by mid-August had arrangements in place for a treaty to be held at Easton in Pennsylvania. The chiefs of the Six Nations and all the Indians living east of the Lakes and as far down the Ohio as the Wabash and Illinois Rivers had accepted the belts of invitation and friendship. “I think nothing can prevent a solid peace being established with most of those Indian tribes,” Forbes told Bouquet, “as the Indian Claims appear to me both Just and Moderate, and what no man in their senses or in our situation with regard to the Indians would hesitate half an hour in granting them.”31
By September the treaty was imminent. The Delawares and their neighbors had been driven into the arms of the French and removed to the Ohio, Forbes explained to Pitt, but now Britain could win them back. Their demands were “few, and to me seemingly not unreasonable,” and the western tribes would be ready to declare for the British, or at least remain neutral, if they could be given assurances of protection. The chiefs were expected to arrive in Easton at any hour. Forbes regretted the peace talks had not been held earlier and given the Indians time to relocate, because he now had to put his offensive operations into effect immediately, and it would be difficult to distinguish between friendly and enemy Indians.32
Even so, there were hurdles to clear. In September, as the army approached its objective, Bouquet gave Major James Grant of the 77th Highland Regiment permission to make an advance on Fort Duquesne. Grant reached the fort undetected, but then blew his advantage by announcing his arrival with drums and bagpipes at daybreak. A sortie by French and Indians routed the British; more than 270 officers and men were killed or missing. Grant, Thomas Gist, and Andrew Lewis, who led the Virginians in the attack force and whom Washington feared dead, were captured. One old Indian told the captive James Smith he could only account for Grant’s behavior “by supposing he had made too free with spirituous liquors during the night, and become intoxicated about day-light.”33 Guyasuta, who had guided Washington in 1753 and then gone over to the French after Braddock’s defeat, participated in the attack.34 Yet the French triumph was short-lived. Having scored a victory, many Indians quit Fort Duquesn
e and returned to their villages. “It was found impossible to retain them,” said Bougainville. Forbes’s army was on the way, and “its success [was] more than probable.”35
Time, however, was running out for Forbes. It was now fall. Heavy rains and lack of wagons impeded the army’s progress, morale was slipping, and people were questioning the apparent lack of activity.36 Attakullakulla and about sixty Cherokees joined the army in October and served as scouts, but Forbes was feeling increasingly put upon and out of patience. The Cherokees, he told Bouquet in the middle of the month, were “bullying us,” threatening to return home if their demands were not met. Attakullakulla, he told another correspondent, was “as consummate a Dog as any of them.”37 Nevertheless, the Cherokees performed useful service, and Forbes needed Attakullakulla. Hearing that the chief’s services as a peacemaker had been requested in Virginia, where returning Cherokees had clashed with colonists, Forbes worried how to manage without him: if Attakullakulla left, no Indians would stay with the army, and there was no word from Easton of how the peace talks were going.38
In fact, the Easton conference was winding down as Forbes fumed. More than five hundred Indians, men, women, and children, representing thirteen nations—the Six Nations, Delawares, Conoys, Nanticokes, Tutelos, and others—had turned up in early October, “but what they will now do, God knows,” Forbes confided to Bouquet. Croghan and Montour both attended the great council, as did Charles Thomson. Croghan found the assembled Indians “Much Divided and Jelious of Each other,” many of them alienated by Teedyuscung. Teedyuscung buckled under Six Nations pressure and accepted their authority over the tribes of Ohio and Pennsylvania, but Pisquetomen and the western Delawares wanted territorial security and independence. Knowing the Indians would never agree to peace as long as they feared that Britain intended to take the Ohio country from them, the negotiators gave the Indians the assurances they needed: the British did not want to settle the land, only to open it to British traders and defend it against the French. Indeed, Pennsylvania actually promised to return the lands west of the Alleghenies that the Iroquois had ceded four years before at Albany.39 The Ohio Indians wanted to keep settlers out of their country, but they needed to let in traders and their merchandise. The Treaty of Easton seemed to secure them both objectives. Had they been junior partners or pawns in the “French and Indian War,” their acceptance of the Easton Treaty might be construed as abandoning their allies. Instead, they were fighting their own war with their own goals, and having achieved those goals, they likely regarded the treaty as the end of the war for them. Pennsylvania published the treaty and sent Post back to the Ohio country with the news to reassure the Indians that the English had no intentions of settling there.40
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