How Braddock marched into slaughter

“Who would have thought it.” Ted Franklin Belue reports these to be General Edward Braddock’s last words as he died on the battlefield at Great Meadows on July 13, 1755. Four horses had been shot from under him.

I have posted about this battlefield before, how it became a major tourist attraction for those boating down the Ohio River into Kentucky in the 18^th century (here and here). The massacre was, in Belue’s words, a “crucible” for European Americans. And it was, incidentally, the making of a young Lieutenant Colonel named George Washington. Everybody who was anybody in frontier Kentucky was there: Daniel Boone, John Findley, Dr. Thomas Walker. (Boone was there as a teamster, not a soldier, though he had the rank of sargeant.)

Here is Belue’s description, from The Hunters of Kentucky: A Narrative History of America’s First Far West, 1750-1792 (Stackpole Books, 2003), of the army he led out from Fort Cumberland on May 29, with the intention of “hack[ing] a war road 110 miles long along an old Indian path — leveling rises, building bridges, blasting out stumps, clearing brush, filling holdes — to deliver men and artillery to Ohio’s dogleg with the Monongahela to oust the French from Fort Duquesne . . . [p. 61]

On May 29, the mighty twenty-two hundred lumbered from Fort Cumberland, an unendingly unfolding phalanx twelve feet wide and stretching more than a mile along Nemacolin’s Path, blaxed three years earlier by Colonel [Christopher] Gist and Col. Thomas Cresap. Braddock’s army was a polyglot of English, Dutch, Africans, Catholics, Protestants, jews, Irishmen, and Scotsmen, followed by wagons, artillery, cattle, and swarms of venereal camp followers. Visitors passing nights visiting fire pits were taken aback at the myriad dialects and languages. But on race was conspicuously absent: Indians.

Braddock deemed the “exotics” troublesome. His three-day meeting with Algonquins and Iroquoians ended with a broadside &mdash: “No Savage Shall Inherit the Land.” Enraged, the Indians left to join the French. [p. 62]

And that was Braddock’s undoing. Had he employed indigenous scouts, he might not have marched his mighty army blithely into ambush.