The Last Empty Places (17 page)

“You are to restrain all such Offenders [who attempt to interrupt British settlement], & in Case of resistance make Prisoners of or kill & destroy them.”

These orders, observes one historian, “amounted to an invitation to start a war.”
¹³

Which is just what happened. Accounts generally agree on events leading up to the fateful moment. Learning of Washington’s approach toward the Forks, Captain Contrecoeur sent out a small party headed by a distinguished French officer, Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, to converse with them and read a summons warning them to stay off French territory. When Washington got word of the French advance party, he assumed it was an attack. He roused his men, marched them through a rainy night for seven miles, and at dawn surprised the waking French party in a woody bottomland—since known as Jumonville Glen. The French jumped up in alarm; one of them apparently fired a shot. Washington ordered a volley in return. The French tried to retreat but their way was blocked by Washington’s Indian guides. There was a pause. Washington held fire to let the French leader, Jumonville, through a translator, read the letter he carried aloud.

Then the accounts vary wildly from eyewitnesses on each side.
Washington’s official account is apparently a whitewashed version of events, written by a young officer covering up his lack of control of the situation.
¹⁴
It stated that Jumonville was killed in combat and so were nine others, and the Indians scalped them.

But a careful reconstruction based on several other eyewitness accounts,
¹⁵
English, French, and Indian, paints a far different drama. Jumonville was wounded and had fallen in the initial volleys. During the cease-fire, Washington took the letter Jumonville carried and walked off to have his own translator read it. While Washington read over the letter, an Indian ally of the British from the Iroquois Confederacy approached the fallen Jumonville. Known as Tanaghrisson, or the “Half-King,” he had his own motives to start a conflict between French and British—he had been trying to rally his own following of Indians, without much success, to join him with the British, in order to keep himself in power.

“Thou art not yet dead, my father,” said Tanaghrisson.

With that, Tanaghrisson split open Jumonville’s skull with several blows from his hatchet. Then he plunged his hands into the cranium and squeezed Jumonville’s brains through his fingers.

Tanaghrisson’s well-aimed hatchet blow was a shrewdly calculated political move on his part.
¹⁶
If he could provoke the French to attack the British—his allies—and the British responded with war, it could help him, and the Iroquois Confederacy, to maintain some influence over the separate Indian tribes of the Ohio Valley. Tanaghrisson’s hatchet murder of Jumonville was just enough of an outrage, in this sodden, brushy creek bottom in the Ohio wilderness with an uncertain twenty-one-year-old George Washington in charge, to spark what has been called the first global war. Starting here at Jumonville Glen, near modern-day Farmington, Pennsylvania, it lasted for seven years, brought in many countries of Europe, and was fought in North America and Europe as well as India and the Caribbean, where Britain and France had colonial territories.

Ultimately, the French had to give their claim to North America over to Great Britain. It was thus a war that defined America’s boundaries, and its lack of boundaries, its open spaces for westward expansion, its cities, its affiliations to which nations of Europe, as well as its sense of independence from them all. It gave Americans a sense of their
own destiny. And it fostered the notion that there is always more land to settle—more open space, another blank spot—just over the next hill.

W
ITH THE SPLITTING OPEN
of Jumonville’s skull, chaos quickly spread on the American frontier. A thousand more French forces quickly arrived by canoe at Fort Duquesne, which is what France named its outpost-under-construction at the Forks of the Ohio. Captain Contrecoeur sent out a party under Jumonville’s revenge-minded older brother, Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers, to run down the retreating George Washington. Washington and his exhausted men holed up in a small, crude British outpost, the aptly named Fort Necessity, huddling in muddy trenches in a powder-dampening downpour as the French and their Indian allies showered them with musketballs from the surrounding forest. In the gloomy dusk Coulon de Villiers offered Washington surrender terms—he could take blame for the “assassination” and walk freely out of the Ohio Valley with his troops, pledging not to set foot in it again for a year. Or he and his men could be destroyed.

At midnight on July 3, 1754, Washington accepted the terms in the outpost’s leaky blockhouse.

Daybreak brought the worst of the humiliation. Washington and his fellow Virginians now were able to identify the French allies.

“[W]hat is most severe upon us,” lamented one of Washington’s party, “they were all our own Indians, Shawnesses, Delawares and Mingos.”

The Indians whom the British thought were their allies had switched over to the French.

The buildup led to all-out warfare between the two great empires. By early September, the alarming news of Washington’s humiliation by the French in the wilds of the Ohio Valley had traveled back across the Atlantic to London.

“All North America will be lost
¹⁷
if These Practices are tolerated,” wrote the aggressively minded Duke of Newcastle, who, through his acquaintance with King George’s son, had the ear of the royal court and convinced it to block the French from building forts in the Ohio Valley.

With King George’s blessing, two infantry regiments set sail from Ireland bound for the wilderness of the Ohio Valley. They were under the command of Major General Edward Braddock, who was also given authority over the ten existing British regiments in North America plus the power to summon up deactivated ones. Braddock, who had trained on the orderly battlefields of Europe and was utterly ignorant about wilderness guerrilla fighting, planned to crush the French not only in their Ohio Valley strongholds, but on three other fronts at the same time—their forts on Lake Ontario and on Lake Champlain, as well as the forts the French had recently built on the peninsula leading to Nova Scotia. This was Acadia, now in British hands, but still heavily French in population.

Braddock’s contempt extended both to Indian warriors and to the fighting ability of American colonial troops—they could not drill with the same precision that the British regulars displayed in London’s Hyde Park.

“[I]t is impossible that [savages] should make any impression” on disciplined British troops, he told Ben Franklin upon arriving in America.

Franklin wasn’t so sure.
¹⁸

Braddock alienated the Pennsylvania Assembly by calling it “pusillanimous” because its pacifist Quaker members wouldn’t appropriate money for his troops to fight the French.

Nor did he warm to Indian diplomacy. Chief Shingas, the head of the Ohio Delawares, approached Braddock and offered to rally other Ohio Valley tribes to help the British drive the French out of the Ohio Valley. The chief then asked him, “What would the British do with the land once they controlled it?”

Braddock replied, “The English should inhabit
¹⁹
and inherit the land.”

The chief asked whether the Indians who were friends of the British could live and trade among the British settlers of the Ohio Valley and have hunting grounds there.

“No savage should inherit the land,” answered Braddock.

If the Indians wouldn’t be free to live on the land, Chief Shingas responded, they wouldn’t fight for it.

Braddock answered that he did not need their help and he had “no doubt of driveing the French and their Indians away.”

These Indians led by Shingas, who had been ready to join the British against the French if it meant they were given back their hunting rights in the Ohio Valley, abandoned Braddock in anger and returned from the colonized East to the wilds of the Ohio. Many of them now eagerly sought to go to war on the side of the French, after being so high-handedly rejected by the British in the person of Major General Braddock.

“I
F IT HADN’T BEEN
L
E
R
OY
, it would have been someone else,” Mattern mused as we climbed the wooded ridge overlooking the old Le Roy farmstead.

He swung the shaft of an old golf club, like a riding crop or machete, to knock aside the underbrush, probed around with it at exposed tree roots and amid the excavated dirt piles from gopher holes to turn up Indian artifacts. Occasionally he poked a little more intently at one chip of rock or another. “I see what
should
be on the site and then block it out and see what
shouldn’t
be there,” he explained. He reached down and plucked leaves of native plants that the Indians ate: wild strawberry, native garlic, Jacob’s root.

It was Mattern’s belief, derived from written accounts and his knowledge of the local geography, that the Indian raiding party, after attacking the Le Roy and Leininger homesteads, regrouped at the top of this wooded ridge.

“They rendezvoused up here and then headed west,” Mattern told me. “They had done their deed. They had gained their power. That was their belief, they gained power from the enemy. You have to understand that it was more important to take captives and to return home with them, not to kill everyone. They believed in counting coup. Basically, it means hitting your enemy and not getting hit back. Not hitting them with an arrow but
striking
them with the hand. It was better to scalp them alive than dead. Hair was sacred—you really took power.”

He probed with his golf shaft at the bare soil around some exposed tree roots, and identified the edible plant known as poke.

“The natives believed that everything had spirit or power. A tree growing up through the rock, standing up to the wind, that has power. The bear has power, the wolf has power, the rock has power.

“Everything has power—that’s why so much was sacred to them.
Their belief system was
so
different from ours, and we called them pagans. The English and Dutch didn’t understand the intricacies.”

G
ENERAL
B
RADDOCK, SURELY
, did not understand the intricacies, nor fathom the deep and ancient Indian attachment to the earth. After telling Chief Shingas that “no savage should inherit the land” and that he didn’t need Shingas’s help to drive the French from the Ohio Valley, Braddock and his column of 2,200 men left Fort Cumberland, Maryland, near the headwaters of the Potomac, in late May 1755. They were marching with purpose toward the new French Fort Duquesne at the Forks of the Ohio, 110 miles away through the wilderness. The British claimed that the French fort had been placed illegally on lands that belonged to the British crown—the entire Ohio Valley. Three hundred light infantry headed the column, backed up by 250 frontiersmen chopping a road through thick forest for the column’s bulk, which included more soldiers, cannons to siege the fort, supply wagons (one driven by Daniel Boone), and a contingent of camp women.
²⁰
In addition to seven Mingo (or Iroquois Confederacy) Indian scouts, though no Indian warriors, the column included a large complement of American “provincials”—essentially colonial farmers—who, in Braddock’s view, were of dubious worth compared to his crack British troops.

Making agonizingly slow progress through “uninhabited Wilderness over steep rocky Mountains and almost impassable Morasses” because Braddock had insisted on using wagons instead of pack horses, the column had just forded the Monongahela River early on the afternoon of July 9. It was now within ten miles of Fort Duquesne. The head of the column and scouts started up a draw into the higher terrain that rose on the opposite bank. The soldiers noticed that, instead of the thick underbrush they had been pushing through on the other side of the river, the forest understory here was open and had been burned to encourage grass to grow—a sign the Indians had used these lands recently as hunting grounds.

Through the open trees, only two hundred yards away, the British scouts suddenly spotted humans. This, it turned out, was the head of a party of nearly a thousand Indians and Canadian soldiers, sent out from Fort Duquesne by Contrecoeur to intercept the advancing British.

It was with surprise on both sides that the two parties met, but each had a totally different response. Braddock’s British troops lined up in formation in the crude road and began to fire coordinated volleys at the Indians and French Canadians. The first few volleys dropped the French commander, Beaujeu, as he waved his hat to direct his trained troops. The seven hundred Indians with Beaujeu, however, instantly took cover behind trees and in the ravine, lay prone on the ground, and otherwise hid from the volleys, then ducked through the forest to surround the British column.

As the Indians opened fire from their hiding places, the British advance party fell back, running into the main group, which continued to move forward. The column of redcoats was jammed into the road as fire poured in on them from the Indian hiding places. They couldn’t even see where to fire their organized volleys. Virtually all the British officers in the advance column were wiped out in the first ten minutes. The American forces who accompanied the British troops attempted, like the Indians who were attacking them, to hide behind trees. But Braddock, charging ahead from the rear of the column, fiercely urged his British troops and the American provincials to keep formation and fire coordinated and disciplined volleys, which he knew to be effective from the wide-open, chessboardlike battlefields of Europe.

According to one witness, “Whenever he saw a man skulking behind a tree,
²¹
he flew at once to the spot, and, with curses on his cowardice and blows with the flat of his sword, drove him back into the open road.”

The Indians and French shot four horses from under Braddock, while Washington, who’d gone into battle severely weakened by illness, lost two. The fight raged for three hours—lead flying from the woods at the orderly rows of redcoats in the crude road and the unseen Indians sounding to British ears as “ravenous Hell-hounds…yelping and screaming like so many Devils.”