The Mammoth Book of the West Read Online Free

territory. For a while this prospered, but then in spring 1753 a new French Governor, Marquis Duquesne, ordered an attack on Croghan’s post by French traders and Ottawa Indian allies. The post was destroyed and its defenders slain. A visiting Miami chief was unlucky enough to be killed, boiled and eaten. To prevent any future intrusions by Croghan and his trading ilk, Duquesne built a chain of four forts from Lake Erie to the Forks of the Ohio, sealing off the Ohio Valley from the trespassing Pennsylvanians. The last fort, on the Ohio Forks (the site of present-day Pittsburgh), Duquesne named after himself.
    The French had thrown down the gauntlet. The British barely hesitated to pick it up. To lose the Ohio Valley would be to lose everything – the entire hinterland.
    The Seven Years’ War began almost as the final log was being hauled into place at Fort Duquesne. Virginia’s Scots Governor Robert Dinwiddie had already sent the 21-year-old George Washington with a warning to the French to vacate it. When they refused, Washington returned with a small force. En route Washington’s men met and defeated a French scouting party. Realizing that he had noisily lost his advantage of surprise, Washington reconsidered the wisdom of attacking the French fort, withdrawing to thetreeless valley of Great Meadows. There he ordered his men to build an earth rampart. “The whole and the parts were not a design of engineering art but of frontier necessity”, he later wrote, “so I gave it the name, Fort Necessity.” Sheltered behind a dirt bank, Washington waited for the French to come to him. They did, on 3 July 1754. The outnumbered British fought valiantly all day, before surrendering honourably in the evening.
    The next few years of the war were equally inglorious for the British. General Edward Braddock, who arrived from England to take command of the campaign, was cocksure and incompetent. In June 1755 he grandly marched his troops towards Fort Duquesne as though on parade. In their van went 300 axemen cutting a 12-foot road through the virgin forest. (“Braddock’s Road” would later prove of inestimable value to those settling the Ohio area.) Surprised by a smaller concealed force of French and Indians, the British became trapped in a valley clearing. They were mown down in their red-coated hundreds. Braddock himself was mortally wounded. George Washington, his aide, had a lucky escape with “four bullets through my coat and two horses shot under me.”
    Afterwards, the Indians began to raid British settlements. “It is incredible,” wrote one French officer, “what a quantity of scalps they bring us.” The Indians may have disliked the fur trade of the French, but most perceived the populous British frontier as the greater threat.
    Despite defeat upon defeat, the British managed to turn the war around. Although they termed the conflict “The French and Indian War”, not all Native Americans were allied to the cause of New France. Sir William Johnson, an Anglo-Irish immigrant who became a Mohawk blood brother, forged an alliance between Britain and the League of Iroquois Indians. The League, which called itself “TheLonghouse”, a reflection of the typical Iroquois dwelling, was composed of six tribes – the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarara – and was versed in warfare, being frequent raiders of other tribes for the purpose of procuring prisoners for adoption or sacrificial torture. Armed with British guns the Iroquois successfully prevented the French resupplying their inland posts in the south and west.
    Besides the Iroquois, the British had another irregular force which was expert at forest warfare, the rangers of Major Robert Rogers. A hard drinker of prodigious strength who had grown up on the border of New Hampshire, Rogers recruited to himself a band of frontiersmen of similar robust stock. They lived off the fruits of the land, travelled light and hit hard far inside New France.