Sherry Chandler

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.

A view of Dr. Thomas Walker

Dr. Thomas Walker, not Daniel Boone, is credited with being the first white colonist to “discover” the Cumberland Gap. Walker explored over into Kentucky in 1750, nearly two decades before Boone. He named both the Gap and the River for the Duke of Cumberland, the butcher of Culloden.

Here is a portrait of Walker from Ted Franklin Belue’s The Hunters of Kentucky. A Narrative History of America’s First Far West, 1750-1792 (Stackpole Books, 2003):

Of all the [Loyal Land Company's] members—all of them bookish, rich, ambitious, and influential men who measured wealth and status in delicately manicured estates, in vast acreage, in two- and three-story stone and clapboard homes fitted with imported English panes, in cattle and horses, in corn and burley fields and barns, in African chattel bought and sold at slave auctions—Walker was the one man among them best suited for the heady task at hand. [This being to claim 800,000 acres of wilderness granted them by George II. They would then parcel out this land to settlers who would owe them quitrents.]

And, too, besides the adventure, there was the ultimate quid pro quo: land. A gentry tobacco farmer, growing “that stinking weed” that so exhausted the soil after a harvest or two, and a two-time member of the House of Burgesses who also served on the Privy Council, Dr. Walker found such prospects irresistible. So alluring, in fact, that it was said of him, “Had Virginia’s land companies been a spider web, Dr. Walker would have been the spider.”

His father had died when he was a boy. But tragedy and loss notwithstanding, Thomas Walker was intellectually keen and well tutored, energetic and disciplined. Even in his last years, his disposition, sad son Francis, inclined toward “fire and great spirit,” and he remained an optimistic, merry woodsman of robust health almost until his death in 1794, a month shy of his eightieth birthday.

Neighbors swapped tales of his practical jokes, pranks bordering on the macabre and played out at the expense of Virginia’s upper crust. Walker, all knew, loathed bourgeois pretentiousness.

Once, it was rumored, he had invited all the neighbors for a barbecue, laying before them plates heaped high with what his guests deemed succulent mutton, which was soon devoured and heartily complimented. Candles dimming, mugs full, and pipe smoke curling to the rafters, someone noticed that Old Fowler, Walker’s aging hound, had yet to show. Alas!—it was soon discovered that Old Fowler’s ribs were laid bare before them. [pp. 20-21]

Barrel of laughs, that Tom Walker.

Although Walker explored over into Kentucky, the Loyal Land Company’s activities were truncated by the French and Indian War. He had worked in partnership with Colonel James Patton, a notorious land speculator. Well, notorious if you were a Native American. It was Patton who was the target of the Shawnee raid at Draper’s Meadow in which Mary Ingles was taken captive.

Beaver Wars

Or the European art and great efficiency in killing:

1689. Darkness was upon Huronia, and to the south and west.

Dutch and English wares arrived in New Netherlands’ ports by the bateaux full, but it was guns with thick butts and fitted with dog-lock cocks that clasped tight the amber and black sparking stones that the Mohawks wanted. Not the arquebuses sold to them an era before: the clumsy matchlocks needed a long cord that watered the eyes with the stink of vinegar when lit, and both ends smoking, and the glowing slow-match clenched in a serpentine arm suspended over the pan to make them shoot, if the ember ignited the priming. Flintlocks–forbidden to troops in France, but Compagnies franche de la Marines in Canada had them–cost more beaver, but the fancy guns killed with greater surety and at a good distance.

Sleek, long-barreled fowlers stocked to the muzzle in walnut, and bullet molds, black powder, and bar-lead–all bartered for heaps of plundered deer-skins; for stolen otter and beaver pelts; for booty of fisher, mink, fox, raccoon, and pine marten furs; for greasy bundles of ebony silk locks, the lank Huron scalps were very finely decorated, braided with strands of white and purple wampum, barleycorn beads, and porcupine quills, and capped with human parchment stained a dirty shade of burnt umber.

“The English have no sense,” declared a warrior of the longhouse, astonished at the spill of goods, his new sense of acquisition, and the power that it gave him. “They give us twenty knives like this for one Beaver skin.” But trader Robert Juet’s words evinced the classic European notion of these novel business dealings. “The people of the Countrie came flocking aboord and brought us . . . Bevers skinnes and Otters skinnes, which wee bought for Beades, Knives . . . Hatchets, and trifles.”

From Ted Franklin Belue. The Hunters of Kentucky. A Narrative History of America’s First Far West, 1750-1792. Stackpole Books, 2003, pp. 4-5

Belue gives credit for the Juet quote to Carolyn Gilman in Where Two Worlds Meet: The Great Lakes Indian Fur Trade published by the Minnesota Historical Society in 1982.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more loving description of a firearm. Or a scalp, for that matter.