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Washington evidently attempted to learn from his indiscretion. Though he continued to exult in the expedition's imminent failure because Forbes ignored his arguments for using the Braddock road, evidence suggests that he executed his orders with professional diligence.

Scouting for the English
A Cherokee with Forbes command scouts Fort Duquesne in 1758

As if forging his disparate, rivalrous, often openly factious international army into a unified force were not enough, Forbes had another problem. His fellow Scot, St. Clair, was apparently incapable of getting along with anyone. Although his position as deputy quartermaster general did not fall within the military command structure -- St. Clair was only a lieutenant colonel on loan from the Royal Americans -- he was the man who fed, armed and clothed the army. He had, moreover, to deal with widespread corruption, avarice, stingy provincial legislatures, pervasive British bureaucratic inefficiency; with farmers who did not want to supply their wagons and horses to men who would probably never return them; and with roads and passes that washed out, disappeared, and destroyed his precious wagons. A man of short temper and no tact, St. Clair antagonized everyone -- farmers, bureaucrats and fellow soldiers alike.

Although he had indeed gained valuable experience as deputy quartermaster general under Braddock, St. Clair's contentiousness originally inclined Forbes to prefer another man to oversee logistics and provisioning. St. Clair, however, was well-connected and received the commission. His objections overridden, Forbes remained guarded in his written complaints about St. Clair. "He is a very odd Man," he allowed to Bouquet in one letter, "and I am sorry it has been my fate to have any concern with him. But more of this hereafter" -- that is, more on Sir John when he might enlarge on his feelings without committing himself to writing.

Major James Grant's September 1758 sortie on Fort Duquesne to avenge Braddock's Expedition was met unexpectedly by spirited French and Indian resistance. In the ensuing carnage, Private Robert Kirkwood of the 77th Highland Regiment was pursued by four Indians and wounded. He later wrote that, "I was immediately taken, but the Indian who laid hold of me would not allow the rest to scalp me, tho' they proposed to do so. In short, he befriended me greatly."

Apparently dissatisfied with his highly important position in supply, St. Clair insisted that his title's final emphasis on "general" conferred upon him the rank of Forbes' second-in-command. Repeatedly, St. Clair meddled in the army's military affairs and operations. In one astonishing instance, he brought the expedition to a standstill by having Virginia Lt. Col. Adam Stephen placed under arrest for insubordination to his presumed authority to command.

With the campaign's success precariously dependent upon the efforts of its deputy quartermaster general, it took all of Forbes' and Bouquet's self-control and diplomacy not to dismiss St. Clair altogether. "I am not So thoroughly informed of all the Rules of the English army as to take upon me to determine the Extent of your Power as a Q[uarter] M[aster] G[eneral]," Bouquet wrote St. Clair with dry ascerbicy. "But I know that in all other Services, They have no right to command as such: You do not act in this Expedition as Colonel, but as Q.M.G. only." Without countermanding the temperamental St. Clair openly, Bouquet and Forbes found ways of tacitly treating Colonel Stephen as though he still exercised his commission.

Major Grant's Piper

That the entire command teetered on the edge of disaster was emphasized by a significant military reversal. As the army inched closer to the Forks of the Ohio, Forbes and Bouquet desperately required concrete intelligence concerning exact distances to the fort, the extent and state of its fortifications, the morale of its garrison, and the number of Shawnees and Delawares encamped about the stockade. At the head of about 800 men, Major James Grant was sent to reconnoiter Fort Duquesne and its environs. Instead of strictly following his orders to conduct his reconnaissance in secret, however, Grant split his force in two, then baited the French by literally beating his drums. The French obliged. Marching out of Duquesne on September 14, they destroyed Grant's forces in pitched battle, killing and capturing hundreds.

By November, it had become fairly evident that the British could not hope to reduce Fort Duquesne before the winter set in. Forbes and his staff concluded as much at the war council held on the 11th of that month. The next day, the French again attacked, this time nearer the main British base camp at Ligonier, and though they were driven back, events occurred that in a way epitomized how lost Forbes' army had become.

Fort Ligonier

The French struck at advance positions commanded by Colonel Washington. Military records of this skirmish are remarkably few and terse, but more details appeared in an anonymous account in the November 30, 1758, edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette. The writer reported that during the engagement another element of Forbes' army, hearing the attack, hurried through the dusk to Washington's assistance. But they were soon fired upon by the very soldiers they had come to assist. Before the confusion was sorted out, some 14 Virginians had been killed by friendly fire. Much later, in 1818, William Findley set down a recollection of Washington's own account, told to him years earlier. Findley wrote that "the parties met in the dark and fired upon each other till they killed thirty of their own number; nor could they be stopped till he [Washington] had to go in between the fires and threw up the muzzles of their guns with his sword." Two units of Forbes' army shooting at each other by night on the shores of the Loyalhanna must have brought Forbes' expedition to its nadir. Stalled at the boundary between the wilderness and civilization, the British resigned themselves to a depressing and possibly fatal delay, within marching distance of their ultimate goal. Yet, at that darkest moment, everything turned around.

During the French attack, the British had taken several prisoners who revealed that the French soldiers at Duquesne were extremely weak, hardly fit to defend the fort. The French had drastically reduced the garrison; their Delaware and Shawnee allies were leaving. Provisions were almost gone -- in fact, the British later discovered that the French had begun eating their horses. The defending garrison was actually far worse off than the attacking army.

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How had the French at Duquesne, recently powerful enough to launch, if not execute, two expeditions, against Fort Cumberland in Maryland and Fort Augusta in Pennsylvania, come to this pass? Generally speaking, they lacked the resources -- great numbers of men and great quantities of materiel -- that the British could rely on. Add the fact that their outposts were situated too far from their sources of supply, and the advantage they had won and come to enjoy became precarious indeed. Nova Scotian Lt. Col. John Bradstreet of the Royal Americans demonstrated how vulnerable Duquesne's supply line was on August 27, 1758. On that date, he captured the principal French supply depot at Fort Frontenac (Cadaraqui) on Lake Ontario and destroyed vast amounts of provisions destined for Forts Niagara, Detroit and Duquesne, together with the boats that were to deliver them.

Cut off completely from Québec and Montréal, Commandant Lignery also lost the diplomatic war being waged to obtain and preserve Indian support. By means of Forbes' behind-the-scenes maneuvering with the Philadelphia Quakers to obtain the crucial Treaty of Easton (October 1758), and through the heroic efforts of the Moravian missionary Christian Frederick Post, who negotiated with the Indians virtually within the shadow of Fort Duquesne, the formerly hostile Delawares and Shawnees had agreed to make peace with the British and began returning to their homes.

Immediately upon hearing the new intelligence regarding the French weaknesses, Forbes ordered units of the Pennsylvania Regiment, 1,000 strong and commanded by Colonel Armstrong, to march on Duquesne the next day. A few days later, he followed with the main body of the army, 4,300 effective men.

With his garrison starving and his Indian allies deserting, Lignery had no choice but to send his French militia back to Illinois and Louisiana. After obtaining undisputable evidence that Forbes' army was resolutely marching on his remaining garrison of about 400 men, he decided to cut his losses and retreat, after destroying what he could. On November 24, scouts brought news to Forbes' advance road cutters that Fort Duquesne was on fire. The army heard a tremendous explosion about midnight.

On the following morning, the entire force advanced along the trail, where they discovered the corpses of those killed at Grant's defeat. They also saw with horror and rage the corpses of numerous captured comrades fastened on stakes, where they had been tortured and murdered -- "so many Monuments of French Humanity," in the words of one writer.

That day, Forbes' expeditionary force took possession of the Forks of the Ohio and renamed the burned stronghold after British Prime Minister William Pitt. The same men who had only days earlier perceived themselves trapped, as it were, just below the summit of their goal now experienced jubilation that admitted almost no limits. They had suffered, but they had persevered and had been rewarded, as if by the gift of grace. Several letters announcing the investment of Duquesne expressed the army's elation, but none so unequivocally as an anonymous notice that appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette: "....Blessed be God, the long look'd for Day is arrived, that has now fixed us on the Banks of the Ohio! with great Propriety called La Belle Riviere....These Advantages have been procured for us by the Prudence and Abilities of General FORBES, without Stroke of Sword....The Difficulties he had to struggle with were great. To maintain Armies in a Wilderness, Hundreds of Miles from the Settlements; to march them by untrodden Paths, over almost impassable Mountains, thro' thick Woods and dangerous Defiles, required both Foresight and Experience…consider…his long and dangerous Sickness, under which a Man of less Spirits must have sunk; and the advanced Season, which would have deterred a less determined Leader, and think that he has surmounted all these Difficulties, that he has conquered all this Country, has driven the French from the Ohio, and obliged them to blow up their Fort....Thanks to Heaven, their Reign on this Continent promises no long Duration!"

In the surviving written record of the Forbes campaign -- in the Pennsylvania and Virginia archives, and particularly in the letters of officers Forbes, Bouquet and Washington -- present-day scholars can detect intimations that the new way west was, if only subconsciously, often viewed as something other than merely a military road. It led toward the setting sun, backward in time, into barbarism and a wilderness where no other roads existed and where the blood-edged tomahawk reigned supreme. At times, the march invited comparison with Biblical and classical descriptions of hell, as it certainly did for Colonel Stephen when he wrote, "a dismal place! [it] wants only a Cerebus to represent Virgil's gloomy description of Aeneas' entering the Infernal Regions."

Yet, this transit through nightmare, despair and the dark night of the soul was an essential prelude to the miraculous reversal. Snaking its way slowly through a gloomy, forsaken no man's land, Forbes' army finally ascended, in the words of the anonymous report to the Pennsylvania Gazette, into "the finest and most fertile Country of America, lying in the happiest Climate in the Universe," a vast fabled garden watered by the fairest and loveliest of all rivers -- La Belle Riviére.

In its own unwitting way, the Forbes expedition of 1758 anticipated in miniature the myth inspiring the pioneers' movement westward as they struggled, blindly at times, to take possession of the North American continent.