His friends may have neglected him, but Braddock did not forget him. He sent word by his aide, Captain Roger Morris:

"DEAR WASHINGTON,

"I am desired by the General to let you know that he marches tomorrow & next day but that he shall halt at the meadows two or three days, It is the desire of every particular in this family and the general's positive Commands to you not to stir but by the advice of the person under whose care you are till you are better which in all hope will be very soon. &c."

>> 11

Washington writes to his friend, "Dear Orme" 12 for news, saying that his fevers are moderate and nearly well. His one trouble is "weakness, which is excessive, and the difficulty of getting to you, arising therefrom; but this I would not miss doing, before you reach Duquesne, for five hundred pounds. However, I have no doubt now of doing this, as I am moving on slowly, and the General has given me his word of honor, in the most solemn manner, that it shall be effected.

"I am too weak to add more than my compliments to the General, the family, &c. and again to desire, that you will oblige me in the above request, and devise the most effectual means for me to join you. I am, dear Orme, your most obedient servant." 12

Soon it was Orme who was in the covered wagon.

XV

HE SHARES IN BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT

W

WHEN Washington complained that Braddock's roadmakers were determined to level every molehill and were so slow that he despaired, he forgot his own experience in the same country a year earlier. It took Braddock seven days to carry two thousand men and some heavy artillery from Fort Cumberland at Will's Creek to Little Meadows; but it had taken Washington with only a hundred and fifty men fourteen days to cover the same twenty odd miles.1

Both officers followed and enlarged what was originally called Nemacolin's Path, after the Indian who guided Christopher Gist to the Forks of the Ohio, as Gist later guided Washington, and again Braddock.

Thus the weaving Indian trail became in time a great highway into the unknown West.

2

Braddock has been abused for carrying useless baggage and taking too great care with his road; but he was not trying to pull off a flying raid; he was aiming at permanent conquest and the establishment of a channel for settlers.

He had his one bit of luck at the Great Crossing of the Youghiogeny since he arrived at a time of low water. Washington the previous year had been unable to get his men over at all.

While Washington lay raging with fever and inactivity and watched Colonel Dunbar's dreary progress, Braddock's men found that everything forbade the speed they had hoped to attain. The horses were so few and of such poor

quality that though the officers had surrendered their extra mounts and given up all but their necessary baggage, it took the army fifteen days to make the thirty-seven miles from Fort Cumberland to the Great Crossing of the Youghiogeny.

In the van, from three to six hundred axes kept up a savage music as they gnawed what was rather a tunnel than a road through the dense and lofty growth. The fallen trees with their interlocking branches must be dragged out of the path, but removing all the stumps was impossible and the wagon train had an infernal task.

Bogs, gullies, rocks and creeks presented varied obstacles. Rattlesnakes whirred and struck; wood-ticks silently invaded the skin and caused an itching that was mania. The screaming victims, scratching at their tingling flesh, made wounds that festered and crippled. More than one soldier had his legs amputated as a result of ticks instead of bullets.

The horses wrecked themselves and the rickety wagons as they plunged and tugged under the merciless whips. The spokes splintered on the craggy boulders or the stumps and writhing roots left by the pioneers; or the wheels sank over their axles in the marshes.

The poor wind-broken beasts foisted upon the soldiers by the traitorous jobbers in horseflesh foundered and perished at the side of their ruined wagons and their stalled cannon and coehorns.

The stronger horses were the unluckier, for after they had wrestled their burdens to the evening camp they were whipped back along the road to bring up the wagons of their martyred fellows. Nothing in all the pities of war is more pitiable than the fate of horses.

The failure of the wagon-train meant that the soldiers must fast as well as labor. They had grown mutinous enough at Fort Cumberland for lack of human food and

over-abundance of Indian corn. Now they lacked the corn. The woods were full of everything green but vegetables. The salt pork, salt beef, salt horse, brought a plague of bloody flux upon the men. This tortured many of them to death and saved them from the less cruel Indians.

The worst of the march was the absence of liquor which was vital to the morale of the soldiers, who had little else to cheer them. They complained afterwards that they were overworked, short of numbers, starved, compelled to drink only water (and that both scarce and bad), and "that the provincials had disheartened them by repeated suggestions of their fears of a defeat should they be attacked by Indians, in which case the European method of fighting would be entirely unavailing."

3

Their despondency was natural. They had been drilled and flogged all their lives to make them automatons on the battlefield. Now they were told that their mechanism would not work against the enemy they were approaching. The little grog "for the stomach's sake" was missing and their bellies were cold and rumbling with swamp water.

The road that Braddock's men carved and agonized upon is not yet effaced and Archer Butler Hulbert, who has traced its scars, describes vividly how the memory of its builders still haunts the region:

"In the forests it is easy to conjure up the scene when this old track was opened-for it was cut through a 'wooden country,' to use an expression common among the pioneers. Here you can see the long line of sorry wagons standing in the road when the army is encamped; and though many of them seem unable to carry their loads one foot furtheryet there is ever the ringing chorus of the axes of six hundred choppers sounding through the twilight of the hot May evening. It is almost suffocating in the forests when the wind does not blow, and the army is unused to the scorch

ing American summer which has come early this year. The wagon train is very long, and though the van may have halted on level ground, the line behind stretches down and up the shadowy ravines. The wagons are blocked in all conceivable positions on the hillsides. The condition of the horses is pitiful beyond description. If some are near to the brook or spring, others are far away. Some horses will never find water tonight. To the right and left the sentinels are lost in the surrounding gloom.

"And then with those singing axes for the perpetual refrain, consider the mighty epic poem to be woven out of the days that have succeeded Braddock here. Though lost in the Alleghenies, this road and all its busy days mirror perfectly the social advance of the western empire to which it led. Its first mission was to bind, as with a strange, rough, straggling cincture the East and the West." *

But the sad men who opened the way had no comfort from visions of the magnificent future of these realms. They foresaw neither the glory that would be McKeesport nor the grandeur of a Pittsburgh-to-come.

They wondered why they were there; why they had not preferred any poverty or toil in the slums of London or the factories or farms of England to going for a soldier. The gaps in their ranks when they left Ireland had been partly filled with raw recruits from Virginia, most of them young immigrants or the children of poor indentured servants. Of Braddock's total of two thousand men, eleven hundred were colonials. He had drilled them bitterly before they marched, to try to whip them into shape for obeying commands in the stress of battle.

The regulars made fun of them and they took refuge in having fun with the regulars. When they halted, they ridiculed the British tactics and spun yarns of Indian horrors.