Creek. The other magazine was not destroyed. In it were found sixteen barrels of ammunition, many gun barrels, a large quantity of carriage iron, and a wagonload of scalping knives-nice spoils of war-but very necessary. There were no cannon; whether they had been removed or sunk in the river was unknown. About five hundred French retreated, part going down the Ohio, and some overland with the French commander, De Lignery, to Presque Isle and Venango. The fort at the latter place was called by the French Machault. Bancroft's description is pertinent. He says: As Armstrong's own hand raised the British flag over the ruined bastions of the fortress, as the banners of England floated over the waters, the place at the suggestion of Forbes was with one voice called Pittsburgh. It is the most enduring monument to William Pitt. America raised to his name statues that have been wrongfully broken and piles of granite of which not one pile remains upon another, but as long as the Allegheny shall flow to form the Ohio, as long as the English tongue shall be the language of freedom, in the boundless valley which their waters traverse, his name shall stand inscribed on the gateway of the West. John Burk, followed by Irving, says Washington raised the flag over the ruins. Burk should have known. He lived in Virginia in Washington's years and had opportunity to learn the fact. Historians generally ascribe the flag raising to Col. John Armstrong, hero of Kittanning.14 Thomas Carlyle, ranging widely in his great work, "History of Frederick the Great," has this footnote (Vol. VI, pp. 431-432): Here is a clipping from Ohio Country, "Letter of an Officer" (distilled essence of two letters) dated Fort Duquesne, November 28, 1758: “Our small corps under General Forbes, after much sore scrambling through the wilderness, and contending with enemies wild and tame, is, since the last four days, in possession of Fort Duquesne" (Pittsburgh henceforth). "Friday 24th, the French garrison, on our appearance, made-off without fighting; took to boats down the Ohio, and vanished out of those countries," forever and a day, we will hope. “Their Louisiana-Canada communication is lost," which Mr. Washington fixed upon long ago, is ours again, if we can turn it to use. "This day a detachment of us goes to Braddock's field of battle" (poor Braddock) to bury the bones of our slaughtered countrymen; many of whom the French butchered in cold blood, and to their own eternal shame and infamy, have left lying above ground ever since. As indeed they have done with all those slain round the Fort in late weeks;" calling themselves a civilised Nation too!" How strange and bitter these words sound in 1921! It now only remained to make the fort good for the reception of a winter garrison, and to re-name it. The heroic Forbes had entirely collapsed from the fatigue of the march, and for some days his life was hanging in the balance. Once again, however, the strong will conquered and he was carried out among his men to superintend their operations. A new and suitable name for the conquered fortress was not hard to find, and Duquesne became Fort Pitt, after the great minister whose spirit had here, as everywhere, been the source of British triumph. Colonel Mercer, with some Vir 14"History of the United States;" Bancroft, Vol. II, p. 495. Irving's "Washington;" Vol. I, p. 288, and "History of Virginia;" Burk, Vol. III, p. 236, where we read: "A short time after the explosion, Colonel Washington, with the advanced guard, entered the fortress amidst the ruins still smoking, and planted the British flag; but the enemy were beyond reach of attack, having dropt down to their settlement at Presque'isle and Venango." ginians and Pennsylvanians, was left in charge of the fort, and towards the close of December, Forbes stretched upon his litter, was borne feet foremost in the midst of his remaining troops on the weary homeward journey through the freezing forests. Though his weakness and his suffering grew worse rather than better, his mind at last, was now at ease. His task was accomplished and Ticonderoga was the only failure of the year. The French were driven from the West, their connections between Canada and Louisiana severed, their prestige with the Indians broken, and the demon of Indian warfare on the Alleghany frontier apparently laid. That all this might have been achieved the next year, or the year after, is no answer to the decisive nature of Forbes' work. There might have been no next year, or year after, for military achievements in America. Peace in Europe was at any moment possible. Events there might take a sudden turn that would make boundary lines on the American wilderness appear to most men a secondary matter. Pitt cherished no such illusions now; his intentions to drive the French from America were fixed and clear. But circumstances at home might weaken his arm; or he might die, for his life was none of the best, and it was of vital import that every stroke should be driven home before a general peace was made. A French garrison anywhere in America would have been hard to move by diplomatic means when once the sword was sheathed.15 The little garrison left by General Forbes to hold the now historic Forks of the Ohio had much to do. Their first duties were sad in the extreme. The bodies of those who had fallen in the fatal engagement on Grant's Hill yet lay scattered on the field, scalped and mutilated. These were gathered and given Christian interment. Then burial parties went to Braddock's battleground and gathered the whitened bones of those sacrificed there, and these were also committed to soldiers' graves. The capture of Fort Duquesne was hailed everywhere throughout the colonies as a harbinger of better days. The ambitious views of the French in extending their settlements to the Mississippi had been frustrated; the friendship of the Indians had been regained. They were no longer the allies of the French and herein is the story of the daring and suffering of Christian Frederick Post. Conferences were immediately held at the site of Duquesne and the Delawares were the first to sue for peace. This conference was held by Colonel Bouquet, with George Croghan, deputy under Sir William Johnson, commissioner of Indian affairs, present, and Col. John Armstrong and other officers also, with Capt. Henry Montour interpreter. Subsequent conferences were held at the new Fort Pitt, participated in by Colonel Mercer, Croghan, Trent and Thomas McKee, assistants to Croghan, with Montour, "Joe" Hickman and other interpreters. All the tribes that ranged the region seem to have participated and everything went along nicely until Pontiac decreed otherwise. The French had occupied their stronghold here and the key to the West but a short time comparatively. Four years and eight months in all, but in that time an appalling amount of suffering and bloodshed had fallen upon the English. It was a period memorable for the terrors and cruelties of unsparing warfare from the time Ensign Edward Ward had been foiled at the approach of the formidable and motley-manned flotilla of Contrecoeur, leaving the unfinished fortification upon which rose Fort Duquesne, and happy indeed was the day when the proud flag of England floated in triumph from its fire-scathed walls. 15"Fight with France for North America;" pp. 283-284. one. Dr. Cyrus Townsend Brady esteems Forbes a hero if ever there was He calls attention to the fact that there is no mention of him in the "Encyclopedia Brittanica" and none in a monumental work entitled "The Dictionary of National Biography." Brady says Forbes was “a man of liberal and enlightened views, courteous in his bearing, and tactful in his methods, but determined-terribly resolute. By his generous and kindly manner, he attached to himself those whom Braddock and his officers had alienated by their contempt. The general was in himself a host." Parkman says: "If Forbes' achievement was not brilliant, its solid value was above price. It opened the great West to English enterprise, took from France half her savage allies and relieved the Western borders from the scourge of Indian war. The frontier population had cause to bless the memory of the steadfast and all-enduring soldier."16 It was the beginning of the end of New France in America, the passing of that strange civilization Parkman has so beautifully described when in reverie, to him: Again their ghostly camp-fires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us, an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism. Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath of the cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage hordes with a mild hand, parental sway, and stood serene before the direst shapes of death. Men of courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of a far-reaching ancestry, here, with their dauntless hardihood, put to shame the boldest sons of toil.17 It all passed, and in its stead there came that civilization that grew out of the march of the pioneers, whose emblem, an axe, was the symbol of progress. One highway of the marchers was through Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh grew apace thereby. Speaking of the Valley of the Mississippi a recent historian says: The valley heard, as I have said, hardly a sound of the Seven Years' War, the "Old French War" as Parkman called it. Only on its border was there the slightest bloodshed. All it knew was that the fleur-de-lis flag no longer waved along its river and that after a few years men came with axes and plows through the passes in the mountains carrying an emblem that had never grown in European fields--a new flag among national banners. They were bearing, to be sure, a constitution and institutions strange to France, but only less to England, and perhaps no less strange to other nations of Europe. I emphasize this because our great debt to the English antecedents has obscured the fact that the great physical heritage between the mountains, consecrated of Gallic spirit, came, in effect, directly from the hands that won its first title, the French, into the hands of American settlers, at the moment when a "separate and individual people" were "springing into national life."18 But this is the story of the "Winning of the West," in which Pittsburgh had its full share. 16"Montcalm and Wolfe;" Champlain Edition, Vol. II, p. 371. CHAPTER XXI. The Perilous Missions of Christian Frederick Post. Forbes is a well commemorated name in Pittsburgh. Rightly enough the place could have been Forbesburgh, but Forbes himself, in attestation of his high appreciation of William Pitt, bestowed the name Pittsburgh. Forbes street, one of the six main east and west thoroughfares, is thoroughly familiar to all Pittsburgh people. The Forbes Public School and Forbes Field are scarcely less familiar. The name and fame of the dying general, whose bloodless triumph gave us Pittsburgh, is immortal. A far humbler person, none the less resolute, with a degree of intrepidity that evokes surprise and admiration in the perusal of his journals, was Christian Frederick Post, who made two perilous missions to the Indians at Logstown and held them there until he convinced them of the good intentions of the English and prevented them from going to the aid of the French garrison at Fort Duquesne. Without this aid the French were powerless to hold the work. The Indians were not desired merely as a reinforcement to the garrison. De Ligneris, the commander, was kept fully informed by his Indian spies of every move of Forbes' army. De Ligneris knew Forbes' strength and his armament. One thing alone would save the French fort-an attack upon Forbes from an ambuscade; in truth, Beaujeu's tactics of July 9, 1755, must be repeated. There were many places on Forbes' route admirable for the purposes of ambush. This to be successful required Indians in great number. Adepts in this their own and best method of attack, De Ligneris could rely only on those Indians near at hand, who since Fort Duquesne was built had been in alliance with the French and who were in greatest numbers on the Ohio, principally at Logstown. These were mainly Mingoes, Delawares and Shawanese. Post tells who, and how he fared while among them; of his extreme peril and the ultimate success of his missions. It is a graphic and thrilling story. When his quaint language and German idioms and the absolutely phonetic character of his spelling from the German pronunciation are compared with the English versions of his journals in Charles Thomson's book, "The Alienation of the Delawares and Shawanese from the English Interest," and in the Colonial Records of Pennsylvania, it will be apparent that the translators had no easy task. The evacuation of Fort Duquesne and the occupancy of the strong position known as the Forks of the Ohio by the English was a really great event in the history of North America. This is acknowledged by the historians; contra, the loss of the place was a severe blow to the French. The Gallic power was steadily weakening, and the star of old France, once high over the new France, was about to set, no more to shine forever. Bradley tells the story well. He says: There was great rejoicing in the middle colonies at the fall of Fort Duquesne, as there had been in New England at the fall of Louisburg, and for much the same reason, since each had been relieved of a neighbour whose chief mission had been to scourge them. Pitts.-27 In England the news was received with profound satisfaction. There was no bell ringing and there were no bonfires. There had been nothing showy in the achievement, and its import was hardly realized. The glory belonged to two men, and their patient heroism was not of a kind to make a stir in the limited press of the period. But the cool fearlessness of Post was a rarer quality than the valour which faced the surf and batteries of Louisburg, and the unselfish patriotism of the invalid brigadier was at least as noble a spectacle as that of the Highlanders who flung themselves across the fiery parapet at Ticonderoga. Schoolcraft, in his great work, writing under the head, "The Iroquois Policy Favors the English," and narrating events after Braddock's defeat, says of the ravages of Pennsylvania Indians: "Foremost in these forays were the Delawares and Shawanese, whose ire appeared to have received an additional stimulus from the recent triumph of the GallicIndian forces. The Delawares had long felt the wrong which they suffered in being driven from the banks of the Delaware and the Susquehanna, although it was primarily owing to their enemies and conquerors, the Iroquois, whose policy had ever been a word and blow."1 Schoolcraft could have added an additional reason for the ire of these Algonquins, as Thomson fully shows-the failure of the Pennsylvania authorities to keep the settlers off these Indians' hunting ground on the Juniata, allotted them by the Iroquois, who desired and requested the removal of the settlers.2 When the long-burning ire of the Delawares and Shawanese is considered, and the fact that it was well fanned by the French for many years, the accomplishment of Post is all the more remarkable. Writing the next year (1759), Thomson, prefatory to Post's first journal, gives expression to the estimate of Post's services at that time, when he says: "The event of this negotiation was that the Indians refused to join the French in attacking General Forbes to defeat him as they had Braddock on the march. So the French, despairing of the fort if the general should arrive before it, burnt it, and left the country with utmost precipitation." The mission of some one who stood well with these tribes was greatly desired by Forbes. Bradley tells us that The provincial authorities thought lightly of the scheme, and moreover grudged the expenditure. They regarded such suggestions as the theories of an Englishman without experience of savages. Nor, indeed, was it easy to find any ambassador to cross the Alleghanies and run the gravest risk of death, and that by horrible torture, in the Indian villages, where English scalps were hanging by hundreds on the wigwam walls. Forbes, however, gained his point, and a man was found who would face the fate that seemed inevitable, and that too, without reward. This hero was a Moravian missionary, and a German, Post by name, a simple, pious person, but intimate with Indian ways and languages, and married moreover to a converted squaw. Post reached the Ohio villages in safety, and was received with tolerable civility; but his hosts insisted on taking him to Duquesne, that the French might also hear what he had to say. As his ostensible mission was to wean the Indians from the French alliance to those peaceful paths of which his order, the Moravians, were the chief exponents, it was not doubtful what the French would say, and little less so what they would do. As he was the guest of their allies, they had to listen to Post, and did not venture to 1"History Indian Nations," Vol. VI, p. 219. 2"Alienation," etc., Thomson, p. 50. 8"Alienation of the Delawares, etc.," p. 171. |