Historic Highways of America/Volume 5/Chapter 2

by Archer Butler Hulbert

CHAPTER II

A BLOOD-RED FRONTIER

THERE is no truer picture of the dark days of 1755–56 along the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia than that presented in the correspondence of Washington at this time. A great burden fell upon his young shoulders with the failure of the campaigns of 1755. Though far from being at fault, he suffered greatly through the faults and failures of others. The British army had come and had been routed. Now, after such a victory as the Indians had never dreamed possible, the Virginia and Pennsylvania frontiers, five hundred miles in length, lay helpless before the bands of bold marauders drunk with the blood of Braddock's slain.

The young colonel of the remnant of the Virginia Regiment took up the difficult task of defending the southern frontier as readily as though a quiet, happy life on his rich farms was an alternative as impossible as alluring. But perhaps a bleeding border-land never in the world needed a twenty-three year old lad more than Virginia now needed her young son. A flood-tide of murder and pillage swept over the Alleghenies. The raids of the savages brought the people to their senses, as the most terrible of tales came in from the frontier. But soon the question arose, "Where is the frontier?" The great track Braddock had opened for the conquest of the Ohio valley became the pathway of his conquerors, and soon Fort Cumberland, the frontier post, was far in the enemies' country. The Indians soon found Burd's road on the summit of the Alleghenies and poured over it by Raystown toward Carlisle and Shippensburg. Each day brought the line of settlements nearer and nearer the populous portions of Virginia and Pennsylvania, until Winchester became an endangered outpost and fears were entertained for Lancaster and York. Hundreds now who had refused the despairing Braddock horses and wagons saw their wives and children murdered and their homesteads burned to the ground.

Whether Dunbar did right or wrong in hurrying back to Virginia, it was a bitter day for Virginia and Pennsylvania. When his army hastened from the frontier, it became the prey of the foes whose appetite that army had whetted. Yet Shirley, reconsidering his former scheme, ordered Dunbar to New York. After drawing the full fire of the French and Indians upon Virginia and Pennsylvania, this army was sent to New York.

Looking backward, with the stern years 1775–82 in mind, it is easy to see that then, in 1755, Pennsylvania and Virginia were to be put through a hard school for a glorious purpose. They were to be trained in the art of war. Of it they had known practically nothing. They had no effective militia. Of military ethics they had no dream. They knew not what obedience meant and could not understand delegated authority. Their liberty was license or nothing. Of the power of organization, concentration, discipline, routine, and method they were almost as ignorant as their redskinned enemies. Although the men of New England had not been given such great obstacles to overcome, it is undoubtedly true that their militia was far more adequate than anything of which Pennsylvania or Virginia knew, at least until 1758.^[1] And yet Braddock died cursing his regulars and extolling the colonials!

Washington was elected commander-in-chief in Virginia on his own dignified terms; the army was increased to sixteen companies and £40,000 were voted for general defense. By October the young commander was at Winchester, where he faced a situation desperate and appalling. The country-side was terror-stricken, and few could be found even for defense; many chose "to die with their wives and families." The few score men who attempted to stem the tide of retreat were almost powerless. "No orders are obeyed," Washington wrote Dinwiddie, "but such as a party of soldiers, or my own drawn sword enforces." Such was the frenzy of the retreat of the frontier population that threats were made "to blow out the brains" of all in authority who opposed them. But the young commander continued undaunted. He impressed men and horses and wagons, and sent them hurrying for flour and musket-balls and flints; he compelled men to erect little fortresses to which the people might flee.

Not the least of his trials—undoubtedly the most discouraging—was the faithlessness of the troops sent out by Governor Dinwiddie upon the reeking frontier. Many of them were themselves panic-stricken and fled back with the rabble. The whole militia régime was inadequate; there was no authority of sufficient weight vested in the commanding officers to enable them to deal even with insolence, much less desertion. "I must assume the freedom," Washington wrote the governor, "to express some surprise, that we alone should be so tenacious of our liberty as not to invest a power, where interest and policy so unanswerably demand it. . . Do we not know, that every nation under the sun finds its account therein, and that, without it, no order or regularity can be observed? Why then should it be expected from us, who are all young and inexperienced, to govern and keep up a proper spirit of discipline without laws, when the best and most experienced can scarcely do it with them?"

As the winter of 1755–6 approached, the Indian atrocities ceased and for a few months there was quiet. But by early spring the raids were renewed with merciless regularity. Every day brought a new tale of murder and pillage; and very soon every road was filled with fugitives "bringing to Winchester fresh dismay."

With his few men this first hero of Winchester (who by the way was at his post, not "twenty miles away") was again straining every nerve that Virginia might not lose the great stretch of beautiful country west of the Blue Ridge. "The supplicating tears of women and moving petitions of the men, melt me into such deadly sorrow, that I solemnly declare, if I know my own mind, I could offer myself a willing sacrifice to the butchering enemy, provided that would contribute to the people's ease." Perhaps the vacillating Dinwiddie threw this letter down as too ardent a one for a military hand to pen; if so Edward Everett has raised it aloft to show his thrilled audiences "the whole man" Washington. "The inhabitants are removing daily," he again wrote—" . . in a short time will leave this country as desolate as Hampshire." To such a degree were the people terrified that secret meetings were held where leaders openly spoke of making terms with the French and Indians by renouncing all claims to the West—no less traitors to the best good of the colonies than those who celebrated over Braddock's defeat.^[2]

The campaign of 1756, as conducted by Shirley, contained no hope of relief for Pennsylvania or Virginia; "so much am I kept in the dark," Washington exclaimed, "that I do not know whether to prepare for the offensive or defensive; yet what might be absolutely necessary in the one, would be quite useless in the other." He well knew a determined stroke at Fort Duquesne, "a floodgate to open ruin and woe," was the only hope of the southern and central colonies. In the meantime he led a desperately exasperating life attempting to hold the frontier with his tatterdemalion army by following Pennsylvania's example of building a line of forts to defend the country. There was no destitution or distress of which he did not know; at times he was begging for blankets to cover his naked soldiers, and again for shoes and shirts; there were few guns in a state of repair and at times in days of danger hundreds flocked to him who could neither be fed nor armed. His life must have been known to Lord Fairfax who wrote in the following strain: "Such a medley of undisciplined militia must create you various troubles, but having Cæsar's Commentaries and perhaps Quintus Curtius, you have therein read of greater fatigues, murmurings, mutinies, and defections, than will probably come to your share." The fact is, in these days there was no officer's duty with which Washington was not acquainted. He supervised the building of forts, the transportation of stores and guns and ammunition, here reprimanding a coarse mountaineer for profanity, there leading the scouts as they threshed a mountain for lurking Delawares; he personally hurried off wagons to endangered outposts with flour and powder, and then listened to and quieted the fears of frantic women and men.

Is the splendid lesson of these years clear? By Providential dispensation these colonies were a miniature of the America of 1775, suddenly thrown upon its own resources and in war. The divine hand is not more clearly seen in our national development than in the struggle of the colonies between 1745 and 1763, which prepared a nation for the hour her independence should strike. And now it was that Washington, Gates, Mercer, Gladwin, Lewis, Putnam, Crawford, Gibson, Stephen, St. Clair, and Stewart learned for themselves and then taught their countrymen to fight; now Washington found what it meant to be the commander of bare-foot armies, already a hero of two defeats, he was yet to play the hero in bitter, pitiful extremities, to become a dogged believer in hopeless, last alternatives, a burden-bearer for hundreds of homeless ones—a people's mainstay when other men were faltering. Now, as in 1775, his task was to rouse a people only half awake to the crisis; to demonstrate the superiority of wisely ordered liberty over license, and the inferiority of personal independence compared with a unity made strong through faithful coöperation, and hallowed by mutual self-sacrifice. And fortunate it was for all the colonies that England compelled them to learn how to carry war's heavy harness now, against the day when they should be assailed by something more disastrously fatal to the cause of liberty than savages fired to murder and pillage by French brandy.

In all these wild days, the old path westward from Shippensburg and Carlisle was often crowded with fugitives fleeing from the reeking frontier, and, quite as often, shrouded in a cloud of dust raised by squads of wan militia hastening westward to the defense of the outposts. Though no officer guarding this strategic passage-way became endeared to his countrymen as Washington, here heroism and devotion were displayed, if ever on this continent. The plans of England during these years will be described elsewhere, but it is to our purpose to know now that for the present she deserted the southern provinces; that she was "willing to wait for the rains to wet the powder, and rats to eat the bow-strings of the enemy, rather than attempt to drive them from her [southern] frontiers." Until 1756 the matter of the defense of the Pennsylvania frontier was left almost entirely to individual initiative. But already the road through Carlisle and Shippensburg had been fortified. Fort Lowther was erected in Carlisle as early as 1753. It was an important post on the route to Virginia, over which the wagons and horses raised by Franklin for Braddock, were, in part, forwarded to Fort Cumberland. Here Governor Morris came, to be in closer touch with Braddock, and here the news of the defeat reached him.

Fort Franklin was erected on the old road at Shippensburg, twenty miles west of Carlisle and thirty-six from Harris Ferry (Harrisburg). It was built sometime previous to Braddock's time but was not used after 1756. Ten miles further on at Falling Springs (Chambersburg) there was no fortification in 1755, nor was there one at Loudoun (Loudon) thirteen miles west of that point. Two miles south of Fort Loudoun Morris erected a deposit at McDowell's Mill (Bridgeport, Franklin County) but, though the spot was well known on the frontier, there seems to have been no regular fort there until 1756.^[3] It was at this point that the new road toward Raystown diverged westward from the main road running south to Virginia. This junction was considered a strategic point by the time of Braddock's defeat, as shown by Shirley's order to Dunbar quoted at the close of the last chapter.

Up to the time of Braddock's defeat the Pennsylvania Assembly had done nothing toward the preservation of the colony, save ordering the road cut from Carlisle to the Youghiogheny river. They furnished not a man for Braddock's army and voted not a pound toward the expense of securing the wagons and horses which made Braddock's march possible. The stores which Governor Morris laid in along the line of the road, at Shippensburg and McDowell's Mill, were secured and forwarded without aid from the Assembly. Though many Pennsylvanians served, in one way or another, in the unfortunate expedition, the public was divided on this issue. Some were loyal to the Assembly and many favored warlike measures. It has been asserted that had not Forbes's Road been built in 1758 its building would have been postponed twenty years.

Passing this interesting speculaion, it is sure Braddock's defeat brought to Pennsylvania a terrible and bloody awakening; nothing can show this more strikingly than the fact that when Braddock's successor came, only three years later, the Pennsylvania Assembly quickly supported him by voting twenty-seven hundred men for offensive service and appropriating half a million dollars for war.

The change was not more striking than was the need for it. All the terrifying scenes in Virginia were reproduced in Pennsylvania; the savages poured through the mountain gaps and fell with unparalleled fury upon a hundred defenseless settlements. Pennsylvania had not expanded further at this time than to the Blue Mountains. Her frontier was not, therefore, nearly as broad as Virginia's, and the frontier firing-line was not so far removed from the populated districts. At the same time it is probable that the Indians from Logstown and Kittanning could get a scalp quicker (so far as distance was concerned) from Pennsylvania than from Virginia—and the French paid as much for one as for the other!

Late in 1756 the Pennsylvania Assembly, now awakened to the condition of affairs caused by their shortsighted, prejudiced policy, took the matter of protection of the frontier into their own hands. Failing to furnish the ounce of prevention, they came quickly with the pound of cure. A chain of forts was planned which, stretching along the barrier wall of the Blue Mountains from the Potomac to the Delaware, should guard the more prominent gaps. "Sometimes the chain of defenses ran on the south side, and frequently both sides of the mountains were occupied, as the needs of the population demanded. Some of these forts consisted of the defenses previously erected by the settlers, which were available for the purpose, and of which the government took possession, while others were newly erected. Almost without exception they were composed of a stockade of heavy planks, inclosing a space of ground more or less extensive, on which were built from one to four blockhouses, pierced with loopholes for musketry, and occupied as quarters by the soldiers and refugee settlers. In addition to these regular forts it became necessary at various points where depredations were most frequent, to have subsidiary places of defense and refuge, which were also garrisoned by soldiers and which generally comprised farmhouses, selected because of their superior strength and convenient location, around which the usual stockade was thrown, or occasionally blockhouses erected for the purpose. The soldiers who garrisoned these forts were provincial troops, which almost without exception were details from the First Battalion of the Pennsylvania Regiment, under the command of that brave and energetic officer, Lt. Colonel Conrad Weiser."^[4] The appended map is a photograph of the original which was made in this year, 1756—for the forts of 1757 are not included. It is of particular interest because it gives the complete cordon of forts along the frontier from the Hudson to the last fort in Virginia which Washington was building. Among other things this map shows clearly how much wider were the frontiers of the southern than those of the northern colonies. The most westerly fort in Virginia was fifty miles further west than Fort Duquesne. The Appalachian range trends southwesterly and its influence upon the expansion of the colonies is most significant.

In this year, though a western campaign on Fort Duquesne did not materialize, the line of the old road was greatly strengthened and a blow was struck at the Indians

Frontier Forts and Blockhouses in 1756

(From the original in the British Public Records Office)

on the Allegheny that was timely and effective. The former was a most important task—of far greater importance than was dreamed at that date. No one then knew the part this road westward from Carlisle was to play in our national development; it could not have been conceived, in 1756, that this route was to be the only fortified highway into the West—the most important military road of equal length on the continent throughout the eighteenth century.

That Fort Lowther at Carlisle was in ruins in 1756 is shown by the following letter written by William Trent to Richard Peters February 15, 1756, which also gives a realistic picture of the state of affairs which compelled the Pennsylvania Assembly to begin the fort-building of that year: "All the people had left their houses, betwixt this and the mountain, some come to town and others gathering into the little forts.^[5] They are moving their effects from Shippensburg; every one thinks of flying unless the Government fall upon some effectual method, and that immediately, of securing the frontiers, there will not be one inhabitant in this Valley one month longer. There is a few of us endeavoring to keep up the spirits of the people. We have proposed going upon the enemy tomorrow, but whether a number sufficient can be got, I cannot tell; no one scarce seems to be affected with the distress of their neighbours and for that reason none will stir but those that are next the enemy and in immediate danger. A fort in this town would have saved this part of the country, but I doubt this town in a few days, will be deserted, if this party [of savages] that is out should kill any people nigh here." Commissioner Young was at Carlisle soon after, putting Fort Lowther into proper condition; he wrote Governor Morris: "I have endeavored to put this large fort in the best possible defense I can; but I am sorry to say the people of this town cannot be prevailed on, to do anything for their own safety. . . They seem to be lulled into fatal security, a strange infatuation, which seems to prevail throughout this province." The fort was not completed in July; Colonel Armstrong wrote Morris on the twenty-third of that month. "The duties of the harvest field have not permitted me to finish Carlisle Fort with the soldiers, it should be done otherwise, the soldiers cannot be so well governed, and may be absent or without the gates at the time of the greatest necessity." In the same letter Colonel Armstrong—the Washington of Pennsylvania—wrote: "Lyttleton, Shippensburg and Carlisle (the two last not finished) are the only forts now built that will in my opinion be serviceable to the public." It is significant that these three forts were on the old road westward, showing that this route was of utmost importance in Armstrong's eyes.

Fort Lyttleton was one of four important forts erected, at Armstrong's direction, by Governor Morris west of the Susquehanna late in 1755 and early in 1756. It was built "at Sugar Cabins upon the new road"; wrote Morris to Shirley February 9: "It [Fort Lyttleton] stands upon the new road opened by this Province towards the Ohio, and about twenty miles from the settlements, and I have called it Fort Lyttleton, in honor of my friend George. This fort will not only protect the inhabitants in that part of the Province, but being upon a road that within a few miles joins General Braddock's road, it will prevent the march of any regulars into the Province and at the same time serve as an advance post or magazine in case of an attempt to the westward." The site of this fort was on land now owned by Dr. Trout, of McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania—about sixty feet on the north side of the old state road.^[6]

Fort Morris at Shippensburg was building in November 1755; "we have one hundred men working," wrote James Burd, " . . with heart and hand every day. The town is full of people, five or six families in a house, in great want of arms and ammunition; but, with what we have we are determined to give the enemy as warm a reception, as we can. Some of our people have been taken prisoners, but have made their escape, and came to us this morning." There had, as noted, been some sort of fortification here at an earlier date, Fort Franklin. As said previously, Fort Morris was still uncompleted July 23, 1756. It was in Fort Franklin, undoubtedly, that the magazine was placed during Braddock's campaign. Fort McDowell, at McDowell's Mill, was also erected in 1756, being an important point at the junction of the old road into Virginia and the new road to Raystown. The savage onslaughts of the Indians were felt no more severely in any quarter than near here. At Great Cove, in November 1755, forty-seven persons were murdered or taken captive out of a total population of ninety-three. The strategic position of Fort McDowell at the junction of the roads was emphasized by Colonel Armstrong, who, after saying that Forts Lyttleton, Shippensburg, and Carlisle were the only ones that would be useful to the public, added: "McDowell's, or thereabouts, is a necessary post; but the present fort is not defensible."

Fort Loudoun was erected on the old road in 1756, one mile east of the present village of Loudon, Franklin County. The spot was historic even before it was fortified, the settlement here being one of the oldest in that section of the state. This point was a famous rendezvous both in the early days when the Old Trading Path was the main western highway, and in after days when the path became Forbes's Road. From here the pack-horse trains started westward into the mountains loaded—two hundred pounds to a horse—with goods which had come this far in wagons from Lancaster and Philadelphia. The site of Fort Loudoun therefore marks the western extremity of the early colonial roadways and the eastern extremity of the "packers' paths" or trading paths which offered, until 1758, the only route across the mountains.^[7] Fort Loudoun was built late in 1755, after considerable debate as to its location. Colonel Armstrong, after examining a spot near one Barr's, finally determined to locate it "on a place in that neighborhood, near to Parnell's Knob, where one Patton lives . . as it is near the new road; it will make the distance fom Shippensburg to Fort Lyttleton two miles further than by McDowell's."

Ten miles southwest of Shippensburg, Benjamin Chambers, a noted pioneer, erected Fort Chambers at Falling Spring, the present Chambersburg. It was a private fort completed in 1756; by some means the owner had secured two four-pound cannon which he mounted in his little fort, the roof of which he had already covered with lead. It was feared that Chambers's little fort would be captured by the savages and the guns turned upon Shippensburg and Carlisle. But their owner repudiated the insinuation and even held the guns from Colonel Armstrong, who was armed with the governor's order to surrender them. Incidentally, also, he made good his boasts and held the fort with equal pugnacity from the savages. Colonel Chambers was of great assistance to General Forbes in the days of 1758, and, as an aged man, sent his three sons, raised in the lead-roofed fortress with its "Great Guns," to Boston in 1775 to fight again for the land he had helped to conquer from the Indians in the dark days of Braddock and Forbes. Such men as Benjamin Chambers made Forbes's Road a possibility. The state road built westward over the track of Forbes's and Bouquet's armies is well known in eastern Pennsylvania as the "Chambersburg and Pittsburg turnpike."^[8]

These forts west of the Susquehanna were garrisoned by the eight companies of the second battalion of the Pennsylvania regiment. While the work of completing the forts not yet finished went on, a campaign of more importance than was realized was conceived by ex-Governor Morris and explained to Governor Denny and the Council. It comprised a bold stroke by Lieutenant-colonel Armstrong at the Indian-infested region of Kittanning on the Allegheny. Here the Delaware Captain Jacobs held bloody sway, having, according to the report of an Indian spy who had recently visited the spot, nearly one hundred white prisoners from Virginia and Pennsylvania captive at that point.

Fort Shirley was appointed the place of rendezvous and the little campaign was kept as secret as possible. As the map shows, Fort Shirley (no. 23), Fort Lyttleton (no. 24) and Shippensburg form a triangle, the longest side of which marks the straight line between the two latter posts. Fort Loudoun was near this line between Fort Lyttleton and Fort Morris at Shippensburg. Near Fort Loudoun a branch of the old Kittanning Path ran northwesterly by Fort Shirley and onward to the Allegheny.^[9] Over this track the bold band, which rendezvoused at Fort Shirley late in August, was to enter the Indian land. It numbered three hundred and seven men, almost precisely the size of Washington's party which precipitated war in 1754. But with the gloomy fate of Washington's band and Braddock's army in mind this must have been a thoughtful company of men that proceeded from Fort Shirley on the next to the last day of August 1756. Their success was all out of proportion to their expectation but not out of proportion to their bravery. Within a week Kittanning was reached, surrounded when it was darkest before dawn, and savagely attacked in the grey of the misty morning. The town was utterly destroyed, some three score savages killed and eleven prisoners rescued and brought back over the mountains. The moral effect of this dash toward the Allegheny was of exceeding benefit to the whole frontier, and Armstrong—always feared by the Indians—became their especial bête noire. The expedition, having been made from lethargic Pennsylvania, had a wholesome effect upon all the other colonies and did much to cement them into the common league which accomplished much before two years had passed. Armstrong, as one of the builders of the new road through Raystown, as efficient officer in the work of fortifying this route, and now as leader of an offensive stroke at once daring and successful, was slowly being fitted for more useful and more important duties when the flower of Pennsylvania's frontier should be thrown across the Alleghenies upon Fort Duquesne.

This officer's opinion, already quoted, that the only forts worth the candle west of the Susquehanna were the three or four which fortified the main route westward from Carlisle to Raystown, appears to have met the approval of those in authority by 1757; on April 10, Governor Denny wrote to the Proprietaries: "Four Forts only were to remain over Susquehannah, viz., Lyttleton, Loudoun, Shippensburg, and Carlisle."^[10] If this is considered a backward step it must also be considered as a concentration of energy in a most telling manner. If the frontier from the Susquehanna to the Maryland line could not be held at every point the decision seems to have been that the line of the old road must be secured at all costs, whereupon all the public forts were abandoned save the four which guarded this western highway. But the decision meant more than this. It was in fact an offensive measure. Instead of holding a line of forts at the mountain gaps as a shield to the settlements, the line of the roadway westward was to be protected and even prolonged—a bristling sword-point stretching over the Alleghenies into the very heart of the French and Indian region. This is proved by the building of a new fort yet further west than Lyttleton—at Raystown, near the point where Burd's road, cut in 1755 toward the Youghiogheny, left the Old Trading Path. This significant undertaking was evidently on the tapis early in the winter. On February 22, Armstrong wrote Burd: "This is all that can possibly be done, before the grass grows and proper numbers unite, except it is agreed to fortify Raystown, of which I, yet, know nothing." On the fifth of May he addressed a letter to the governor in which he said: " . . prompts me to propose to your Honour what I have long ago suggested, to the late Governor and gentlemen commissioners, that is the building a fort at Raystown without which the King's business and the country's safety can never be effected to the westward. . . 'Tis true this service will require upwards of five hundred men, as no doubt they will be attacked if any power be at Fort Duquesne, because this will be a visible, large and direct stride to that place." Thus it is clear that every step westward on the new-cut roadway from Fort Lyttleton toward Raystown was a step toward Fort Duquesne, and every fortification built on this track was a "visible, large and direct" stroke at the power of France on the Ohio. A fort was erected at Raystown within the year.

Layout 2

1. See Davies's Sermon, Virginia's Danger and Remedy, (Glasgow, 1756) 2d ed., p. 6; Cort's Colonel Henry Bouquet, p. 74; London Public Advertiser, October 3, 1755; Bouquet au Forbes, July 31, 1758, p. 113; "I know of only one remedy for the frightful indolence of the officers of these provinces, which would be to drum one out in the presence of the whole army"—Bouquet au Forbes, July 1758; Bouquet Papers, 21, 640, fol. 95. Bury: Exodus of the Western Nations vol. ii, pp. 250–251.
2. Pennsylvania Colonial Records, vol. vi, p. 503.
3. Morris to Braddock, July 3, 1755.
4. Frontier Forts of Pennsylvania, vol. i, pp. 4, 5.
5. Cabins fortified by their owners and neighbors.
6. Frontier Forts of Pennsylvania, vol. i, p. 558.
7. Braddock's Road cannot be considered as a wagon road at this time; long before hostilities had ceased it had become impassable for wagons.
8. Frontier Forts of Pennsylvania, vol. i, p. 536.
9. Historic Highways of America, vol. ii, p. 85.
10. Pennsylvania Archives, vol. iii, p. 119.