HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA
VOLUME 4
[Illustration: BRADDOCK'S GRAVE
[_The depression on the right is the ancient track of Braddock's
Road; near the single cluster of gnarled apple trees in the meadow
beyond, Braddock died and was first buried_]]
HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA
VOLUME 4
Braddock's Road
AND
THREE RELATIVE PAPERS
BY
ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT
_With Maps and Illustrations_
[Illustration]
THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY
CLEVELAND, OHIO
1903
COPYRIGHT, 1903
BY
THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 11
I. ROUTES OF THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH WESTWARD 15
II. THE VIRGINIA CAMPAIGN 30
III. FROM ALEXANDRIA TO FORT CUMBERLAND 61
IV. A SEAMAN'S JOURNAL 79
V. THE BATTLE OF THE MONONGAHELA 108
VI. A DESCRIPTION OF THE BACKWOODS 136
VII. SPARKS AND ATKINSON ON BRADDOCK'S ROUTE 166
VIII. BRADDOCK'S ROAD IN HISTORY 191
ILLUSTRATIONS
I. BRADDOCK'S GRAVE _Frontispiece_
II. ENGLISH AND FRENCH ROUTES TO THE OHIO; 1756 21
III. PLAN OF FORT CUMBERLAND; FEBRUARY 1755 27
IV. VIEW OF FORT CUMBERLAND; 1755 45
V. MAP OF BRADDOCK'S ROAD; ABOUT 1759 69
VI. BRADDOCK'S ROAD NEAR FROSTBURG, MARYLAND 148
VII. MIDDLETON'S MAP OF BRADDOCK'S ROAD; 1847 174
VIII. BRADDOCK'S ROAD IN THE WOODS NEAR FARMINGTON, PENNSYLVANIA 200
PREFACE
The French were invariably defeated by the British on this continent
because the latter overcame natural obstacles which the former blindly
trusted as insurmountable. The French made a league with the
Alleghenies--and Washington and Braddock and Forbes conquered the
Alleghenies; the French, later, blindly trusted the crags at Louisbourg
and Quebec--and the dauntless Wolfe, in both instances, accomplished the
seemingly impossible.
The building of Braddock's Road in 1755 across the Alleghenies was the
first significant token in the West of the British grit which finally
overcame. Few roads ever cost so much, ever amounted to so little at
first, and then finally played so important a part in the development of
any continent.
A. B. H.
MARIETTA, O., December 8, 1902.
Braddock's Road
and
Three Relative Papers
CHAPTER I
ROUTES OF THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH WESTWARD
If Providence had reversed the decree which allowed Frenchmen to settle
the St. Lawrence and Englishmen the middle Atlantic seaboard, and,
instead, had brought Englishmen to Quebec and Frenchmen to Jamestown, it
is sure that the English conquest of the American continent would not
have cost the time and blood it did.
The Appalachian mountain system proved a tremendous handicap to Saxon
conquest. True, there were waterways inland, the Connecticut, Hudson,
Delaware, James, and Potomac rivers, but these led straight into the
mountains where for generations the feeble settlements could not spread
and where explorers became disheartened ere the rich empire beyond was
ever reached.
The St. Lawrence, on the other hand, offered a rough but sure course
tempting ambitious men onward to the great lake system from which it
flowed, and the Ottawa River offered yet another course to the same
splendid goal. So, while the stolid English were planting sure feet
along the seaboard, New France was spreading by leaps and bounds across
the longitudes. But, wide-spread as these discoveries were, they were
discoveries only--the feet of those who should occupy and defend the
land discovered were heavy where the light paddle of the voyageur had
glistened brightly beneath the noon-day sun. It was one thing to seek
out such an empire and quite another thing to occupy and fortify it. The
French reached the Mississippi at the beginning of the last quarter of
the seventeenth century; ten years after the middle of the eighteenth
they lost all the territory between the Atlantic and Mississippi--though
during the last ten years of their possession they had attempted
heroically to take the nine stitches where a generation before the
proverbial one stitch would have been of twenty-fold more advantage. The
transportation of arms and stores upstream into the interior, around
the foaming rapids and thundering falls that impeded the way, was
painfully arduous labor, and the inspiration of the swift explorers,
flushed with fevered dreams, was lacking to the heavy trains which
toiled so far in the rear.
There were three points at which the two nations, France and England,
met and struck fire in the interior of North America, and in each
instance it was the French who were the aggressors--because of the easy
means of access which they had into the disputed frontier region. They
came up the Chaudière and down the Kennebec or up the Richelieu and Lake
Champlain, striking at the heart of New England; they ascended the St.
Lawrence and entered Lake Ontario, coveted and claimed by the Province
of New York; they pushed through Lake Ontario and down the Allegheny to
the Ohio River, which Virginia loved and sought to guard. The French
tried to guard these three avenues of approach by erecting fortresses on
the Richelieu River, on Lakes Champlain, Ontario, and Erie, and on the
Allegheny and Ohio Rivers. These forts were the weights on the net
which the French were stretching from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to
the mouth of the Mississippi. And when that net was drawn taut New
England and New York and Virginia would be swept into the sea!
It was a splendid scheme--but the weights were not heavy enough. After
interminable blunders and delays the English broke into the net and then
by desperate floundering tore it to fragments. They reached the line of
forts by three routes, each difficult and hazardous, for in any case
vast stretches of forests were to be passed; and until the very last,
the French had strong Indian allies who guarded these forests with valor
worthy of a happier cause. New England defended herself by ascending the
Hudson and crossing the portage to Lake George and Lake Champlain. New
York ascended the Mohawk and, crossing the famous Oneida portage to
Odeida Lake, descended the Onondaga River to Oswego on Lake Ontario.
Virginia spreading out, according to her unchallenged claims, across the
entire continent, could only reach the French on the Ohio by ascending
the Potomac to a point near the mouth of Wills Creek, whence an Indian
path led northwestward over a hundred miles to the Monongahela, which
was descended to its junction with the Ohio. The two former routes, to
Lake Champlain and to Lake Ontario, were, with short portages,
practically all-water routes, over which provisions and army stores
could be transported northward to the zone into which the French had
likewise come by water-routes. The critical points of both routes of
both hostile nations were the strategic portages where land travel was
rendered imperative by the difficulties of navigation. On these portages
many forts instantly sprang into existence--in some instances mere posts
and entrepôts, in some cases strongly fortified citadels.
The route from Virginia to the Ohio Valley, finally made historic by the
English General Braddock, was by far the most difficult of all the ways
by which the English could meet the French. The Potomac was navigable
for small boats at favorable seasons for varying distances; but beyond
the mountains the first water reached, the Youghiogheny, was useless for
military purposes, as Washington discovered during the march of the
Virginia Regiment, 1754. The route had, however, been marked out under
the direction of Captain Thomas Cresap, for the Ohio Company, and was,
at the time of Washington's expedition, the most accessible passageway
from Virginia to the "Forks of the Ohio." The only other Virginian
thoroughfare westward brought the traveller around into the valley of
the Great Kanawha which empties into the Ohio two hundred odd miles
below the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. It was over
this slight trail by Wills Creek, Great Meadows, and the Forks of the
Ohio that Washington had gone in 1753 to the French forts on French
Creek; and it was this path that the same undaunted youth widened, the
year after, in order to haul his swivels westward with the vanguard of
Colonel Fry's army which was to drive the French from the Ohio.
Washington's Road--as Nemacolin's Path should, in all conscience, be
known--was widened to the summit of Mount Braddock. From Mount
Braddock Washington's little force retraced their steps over the road
they had built in the face of the larger French army sent against them
until they were driven to bay in their little fortified camp, Fort
Necessity, in Great Meadows, where the capitulation took place after an
all-day's battle. Marching out with the honors of war, the remnant of
this first English army crawled painfully back to Wills Creek. All this
took place in the summer of 1754.
[Illustration: ENGLISH AND FRENCH ROUTES TO THE OHIO (1756)
[_From the original in the British Museum_]]
The inglorious campaign ending thus in dismay was of considerably more
moment than its dejected survivors could possibly have imagined. Small
as were the numbers of contestants on both sides, and distant though the
scene of conflict might have been, the peace between England and France
was at this moment poised too delicately not to be disturbed by even the
faintest roll of musketry in the distant unknown Alleghenies.
Washington had been able neither to fight successfully nor to avoid a
battle by conducting a decent retreat because the reinforcements
expected from Virginia were not sent him. These "reinforcements" were
Rutherford's and Clarke's Independent Companies of Foot which Governor
Dinwiddie had ordered from New York to Virginia but which did not arrive
in Hampton Roads until the eighth of June. On the first of September
these troops were marched to Wills Creek, where, being joined by Captain
Demerie's Independent Company from South Carolina, they began, on the
twelfth of September, the erection of a fort. The building of this fort
by Virginia nearly a hundred miles west of Winchester (then a frontier
post) is only paralleled by the energy of Massachusetts in building two
forts in the same year on the Kennebec River--Fort Western and Fort
Halifax. New York had almost forgotten her frontier forts at Saratoga
and Oswego, and the important portage between the Hudson and Lake George
was undefended while the French were building both Fort Ticonderoga and
Fort Frederick (Crown Point) on Lake Champlain. New York and New England
could have seized and fortified Lake Champlain prior to French
encroachment as easily as Virginia could fortify Wills Creek. Virginia,
however, had been assisted from the royal chest, while the assemblies of
the other colonies were in the customary state of turmoil, governor
against legislature. The intermediate province of Pennsylvania, home of
the peaceful Quakers, looked askance upon the darkening war-clouds and
had done little or nothing for the protection of her populous frontiers.
As a result, therefore, the Virginian route to the French, though
longest and most difficult, was made, by the erection of Fort Cumberland
at Wills Creek, at once the most conspicuous.
Fort Cumberland, named in honor of the Duke of Cumberland,
Captain-general of the English Army, was located on an eminence between
Wills Creek and the Potomac, two hundred yards from the former and about
four hundred yards from the latter. Its length was approximately two
hundred yards and its breadth nearly fifty yards; and "is built," writes
an eye-witness in 1755, "by logs driven into the ground, and about 12
feet above it, with embrasures for 12 guns, and 10 mounted 4 pounders,
besides stocks for swivels, and loop holes for small arms." As the
accompanying map indicates, the fort was built with a view to the
protection of the store-houses erected at the mouth of Wills Creek by
the Ohio Company. This is another suggestion of the close connection
between the commercial and military expansion of Virginia into the Ohio
basin. Wherever a storehouse of the Ohio Company was erected a fort soon
followed--with the exception of the strategic position at the junction
of the Allegheny and Monongahela where English fort building was brought
to a sudden end by the arrival of the French, who, on English
beginnings, erected Fort Duquesne in 1754. A little fort at the mouth of
Redstone Creek on the Monongahela had been erected in 1753 but that,
together with the blasted remains of Fort Necessity, fell into the hands
of the French in the campaign of 1754. Consequently, at the dawning of
the memorable year 1755, Fort Cumberland was the most advanced English
position in the West. The French Indian allies saw to it that it was
safe for no Englishman to step even one pace nearer the Ohio; they
skulked continually in the neighboring forests and committed many
depredations almost within range of the guns of Fort Cumberland.
[Illustration: PLAN OF FORT CUMBERLAND, AND VICINITY; DATED FEBRUARY,
1755 [_Showing buildings of the Ohio Company across the Potomac River_]
(_From the original in British Museum_)]