army and empire british soldiers on the american frontier 1758 1775

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Army and Empire

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studies in war, society,and the military

editors

Mark GrimsleyOhio State University

Peter MaslowskiUniversity of Nebraska

editorial board

DAnn CampbellAustin Peay State University

Mark A. ClodfelterNational War College

Brooks D. SimpsonArizona State University

Roger J. SpillerCombat Studies InstituteU.S. Army Commandand General Staff CollegeFort Leavenworth

Timothy H. E. TraversUniversity of Calgary

Arthur WaldronU.S. Naval War College

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Army and Empire

British Soldiers on theAmerican Frontier, 17581775

Michael N. McConnell

University of Nebraska PressLincoln and London

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2004 by the Board of Regentsof the University of Nebraska

All rights reservedManufactured in the

United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McConnell, Michael N. (Michael Norman)British soldiers on the

American frontier, 17581775 /Michael N. McConnell.

p. cm.(Studies in war, society,and the military)

Includes bibliographical references(p. ) and index.

isbn 0-8032-3233-0 (cl.: alk. paper)isbn 0-8032-0479-5 (electronic)

1. Great Britain. ArmyMilitary life.2. Great Britain. ArmyHistory18th

century. 3. Frontier and pioneerlifeUnited States. 4. Great Britain

ColoniesAmericaDefenses.I. Title. II. Series.

u767.m37 2004973.2'7dc222004008420

Set in Jansen by Kim Essman.Printed by Thomson-Shore Inc.

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For my mother and fatherJoan S. McConnellFred N. McConnell

and to the memory ofRose Ann Lee

David LeeElizabeth Thorpe

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Contents

List of Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xiIntroduction xv

1. The British Occupation of the West 12. Frontier Fortresses 323. Military Society on the Frontier 534. The Material Lives of Frontier Soldiers 735. The World of Work 826. Diet and Foodways 1007. Physical and Mental Health 114

Conclusion 145Notes 153Bibliography 189Index 207

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Illustrations

Figures1. Cantonment of forces, 1766 xiii2. Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander in chief, 175963 xx3. Gen. Thomas Gage, commander in chief, 176375 24. Draft of the Mississippi River, 1765 65. General Forbess Marching Journal to the Ohio 96. Fort Pitt, November 1759 337. Fort Ligonier, June 1762 358. Plan of Fort Niagara, 1764 369. View of Detroit, July 25, 1794 36

10. Sketch of the fort at Michilimackinac 3711. Plan of Mobile, 1770 3812. Plan of Pensacola, 1765 3913. Womens, mens, and childrens shoes 5414. Whistle, harp, whizzer, and marbles 6715. Snuff box, ring, thimbles, pins, combs 6916. Pencils, padlock, key, coins 7517. Cooking and dining utensils 7918. Map of Niagara River 8419. Niagara River gorge from the west 8620. Iron shovel and axe heads 8721. One of two stone redoubts at Fort Niagara 8922. Bake house at Fort Niagara 10923. Chamber pot, toothbrush, medicine bottles, pill tile 12024. Plan of Croft-Town, 1770 12425. View of Fort Erie, 1773 149

Maps1. The Army and the West, end of 1760 292. The Army and the West, summer 1763 303. The Army and the West, end of 1766 314. The Army and the West, summer 1773 146

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Tables1. Army manpower losses and gains in North America,

176667, 1770 1162. Health of British forces overseas,

176875 1173. Army rates of sickness and death in North America,

176667, 1770 121

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Acknowledgments

This book took longer to complete than I had originally planned and, assometimes happens, it took a decidedly different turn from what I had orig-inally intended. That it reached completion at all owes a great deal to thekindness and generosity of many institutions and individuals. Research tripsto the William L. Clements Library and the David Library of the AmericanRevolution were both protable and enjoyable thanks to Professors JohnDann and David Fowler and their capable staffs. I also owe thanks to theDavid Library for a research fellowship. The Alderman Library, Universityof Virginia; the British Library; the Burton Historical Collection of the De-troit Public Library; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the HistoricalSociety of Western Pennsylvania; the Oneida Country Historical Society inNew York; the National Archives of Canada; the National Army Museum inLondon; and the Scottish Records Ofce all cheerfully supplied materialsand answered queries about their collections. Brian Dunnigan, formerlyexecutive director of the Old Fort Niagara Association, generously sharedhis own work and research les at an early stage of my research and hassince been of particular help as the head of research and publications at theClements Library.

The Fort Ligonier Museum in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, has becomesomething of a second home over the past few years. Not only have I learnedmuch about British soldiers in America from the director, Martin West,and curators Penny West and Shirley Iscrupe, I have always enjoyed a warmwelcome and generous hospitality. Marty shared his impressive knowledgeof eighteenth-century fortication and military technology, while Shirleyproved to be a most valuable guide through the museums archaeologicalcollections. Fort Ligonier also provided venues for sharing ideas and re-search, as did the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, David Curtis Skaggsof Bowling Green University, Warren Hofstra of Shenandoah University,and the Organization of American Historians.

James Merrell was generous enough to read the entire manuscript at acritical stage; his insights and editorial skills spared me any number of errors

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and fractured phrases. Martin West, Warren Hofstra, and Harold Seleskyalso read the manuscript at various stages and offered much sound advice,while Peter Way shared materials and insights from his own research oncommon British soldiers in America. I have also beneted greatly from thecomments and critiques of several friends and colleagues here in Birm-ingham. Wendy Gunther-Canada, Carolyn Conley, Andrew Keitt, DanielLesnick, Raymond Mohl, and James Tent brought insights to bear fromelds as diverse as medieval Italy and modern political theory as they lis-tened patiently to half-formed ideas. Eddie Luster and Rebecca Naramoreof the Sterne Library interlibrary loan department managed to ll everyrequest, no matter how obscure.

Alice and Michael continue to offer the kind of moral support that canbe found nowhere else. So do my parents, whose own love of history andlearning set me on a career path that has been rewarding in so many ways.

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Introduction

Few men had greater rsthand knowledge of Britains army in Americathan its mustering agents. James Pitcher, Commissary of the Musters,and his two assistants were responsible for verifying the number of soldiersin each regiment. Theirs was important work; the musters, held twice ayear, provided an independent account of the armys strength, serving as acheck of the monthly reports submitted by the regiments. Since pay andallowances were based on these returns, no part of the army could expect itsallotment until Pitcher had veried the returns based on his departmentsown inspections.1

During the interlude between the Seven Years War and the AmericanRevolution, Pitcher and his men once again prepared for long, dangerousjourneys from army headquarters in New York City; their travels wouldtake them to every corner of Britains North American possessions as wellas to the island garrisons located on Bermuda and the Bahamas. Pitcherheaded for the Ohio Country, following Forbess Road west, to sprawlingFort Pitt. One of his assistants headed up the Hudson River on the rstleg of a trek that eventually took him through the Great Lakes to distantFort Michilimackinac at the conuence of Lakes Huron and Michigan. Theother man traveled south by ship and cross-country, ending his trip in thenew and sultry province of West Florida, where redcoats stood guard at theformer Spanish and French forts of Pensacola and Mobile.2

Altogether, 1765 these agents covered some 9,800 miles, much of itthrough the western periphery of British America, lands only recently at-tached to the empire. Indeed, their travels followed the course taken byBritish expansion during and immediately after the Seven Years War: overthe Alleghenies to the upper Ohio valley, up the Mohawk valley to LakeOntario, and around the Niagara portage to the upper Great Lakesthepays den haut of New France and the heart of the French-Indian tradingand alliance network. Much farther south, British troops clung to decayedoutposts in West Florida, having arrived only two years earlier.

This new imperial frontier, however, was by no means xed. In addition

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to the string of forts guarding portages and rivers, Pitcher and his agentswould have seen the ruins of posts abandoned during the recent war withtrans-Appalachian Indians, and not until the end of 1765 did the redcoatsnally take possession of Fort Chartres and the Illinois Country.3

The journeys of Pitcher and his men revealed many features of the evolv-ing network of British garrisons and of military life in the West. First, andperhaps most compelling for travelers, were the distances that dened thenew imperial frontier, which stretched in a broad z shape from the GreatLakes to Pensacola Bay (see map 1)the regions expanse was better mea-sured in weeks or months than in miles. Moreover, the West held a widelyvaried landscape, from the upper Great Lakes with their numbing wintersto the tropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico, frequently invaded by violenthurricanes.

The West occupied by redcoats was also a network of fortications: someimpressive works of earth and stone, others mere stockades. Though Britishsoldiers were used to serving in widely scattered detachments in Britain orIreland, at home this generally meant duty in garrison towns or knownhavens of smugglers. In contrast, British forts in western America were notonly widely separated from each other but from the civilian world withinthe settled colonies as well.

Nevertheless, as Pitcher and his assistants visited one post after another,they would have seen unmistakable signs of society, however small orcrude by the standards of colonial or British civilians. At nearly every fortlived at least a few wives and children, dependents whose poverty left themlittle choice but to follow the regiments. Englishmenand womenfoundthemselves serving alongside Irishmen, Scots, Germans, Frenchmen, andAfrican Americans; these redcoats in the West served in an army whosemanpower came from virtually every corner of the British Atlantic. In theirbarrack rooms, as well as on their persons, these people could display at leastsome elementsbe it fancy cloth or ne chinaof the dynamic world ofcommerce that helped dene Britains relations with its far-ung colonies.

The mustering agents would also have understood that what dened thedaily activities of these military communities, which ranged in size froma few dozen inhabitants to 200 or 300, was less the relentless routine ofclose-order drill and musketry than the heavy labor and drudgery involvedin keeping themselves fed, clothed, and housed. The impermanent natureof fortications built of wood and earth meant that redcoats also spent longhours wielding picks, shovels, and broadaxes in an endless cycle of buildingand rebuilding. In their off-duty time, common soldiers and ofcers alike

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could be found nurturing garden plots, tending livestock, hunting, andshing, all in an effort to supplement the lling but seldom nutritious rationsof salt pork, peas, and bread.

The mustering agents would also have found unmistakable signs of illhealth among the troops and dependents as well as notes in regimentalbooks recording deaths. Added to the sprains, lacerations, and broken bonescommonly associated with military and civilian labor, soldiers faced dan-gers from the climatefrom tropical diseases to frostbite. The need tomove men and supplies throughout the West exposed redcoats to the riskof drowning, dying of exposure, or crippling injury on breakneck moun-tain roads. Moreover, all of these dangers beset an army whose manpowercontinued to age because of life enlistments and a shortage of recruits.

From the autumn of 1758, when British and provincial soldiers rst enteredthe lands west of the Appalachians, until 1774, when mounting colonial re-sistance to parliamentary acts drew most of the army in America to Boston,the protection and management of the West and its peoples was a principalconcern of the army and its leaders in Whitehall. Much of the permanentforce kept in the American colonies after 1763 saw service in the West;between 1758 and 1774 fully one-fth of Britains infantry regiments spenttime standing guard over the Great Lakes, the Gulf Coast, and the Ohioand Mississippi valleys in between.

The military landscape that Pitcher and his men encountered on theirtravels into the West represented an altogether unprecedented experiencefor Britains regular army. Nothing in the armys past could fully prepareredcoats for the challenges of duty on the far western periphery of BritishAmerica. The duty of occupying territory and giving weight to govern-mental authority was not in itself new to the British army: redcoats hadmaintained a long-standing occupation of Ireland, campaigned against Ja-cobites in the Highlands of Scotland, and chased smugglers along Englandscoasts, and they had provided security in Nova Scotia and Newfoundlandas well as in the slave-based sugar islands in the West Indies. What wasdifferent about the British armys experience in the American West was notmerely the physical magnitude of the territory but the distinctive social andcultural complexity of the world within which redcoats lived and worked.

Elsewhere they found themselves in a recognizable British world (inIreland or Scotland) or in places where the natives, whether African or Aca-dian French, were essentially separateeither enslaved or bent on livingtheir own lives undisturbed by empire. But the region beyond the Ap-

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palachians was alive with what must have seemed to redcoats a bewilderingarray of peoples and interests. Natives who were once the allies of theFrench now found themselves facing a British regime that had long beenthe enemy. Indians control over their own lands and economies becameincreasingly problematic with the presence of British traders on the GreatLakes and colonial settlers in the Ohio Country. As the army attempted tointroduce what has been called garrison government into the West, it wasinevitably drawn into the wider world around it.4 More than just militaryposts existing as enclaves in others lands, British garrisons were yet onemore type of community in a complex matrix of peoples and cultures.

The chapters that follow are an exploration of redcoats lives in the West,emphasizing themes that are fundamental to any larger exploration of thearmys role as an agent of empire on Britains frontier in America. Chapter 1examines the armys occupation of the West beginning in the waning days ofthe Seven Years War, and chapter 2 takes a close look at the paramount fea-ture of that occupation: the fortied garrisons that dened the armys Westand shaped the lives of those who lived within their walls. Those people arethe subject of the remaining chapters. Chapter 3 examines the makeup offrontier garrisons, emphasizing the social and ethnic complexities of whaton the surface appears to be a uniform military force. Chapter 4 expands thepicture of garrison communities by looking into the material lives of soldiersand military dependents. The next three chapters take as their topics therelated themes of work, diet, and healthissues that dominated the lives ofall ranks of redcoats in the West. The conclusion looks back on the Westover a decade and a half of military occupation, examining both changesand continuities in the armys experience.

This book follows a path charted and developed by a new generation ofscholarship on the British army and its experiences in the colonies. Thesestudies, in turn, have built upon the emphasis of the new military historyon armies as social as well as military organizations and their relation-ships to the states and societies that spawned and sustained them. Currentscholarship on the British army in America covers a wide range of topics:encounters between regulars and provincials, common soldiers emergingidentity as a labor force and their encounters with wholly new conceptsof war making, and the redcoats experience in waging a war for empirebetween 1755 and 1763.5

In one important respect, however, this study departs from the literatureon redcoats in America. Instead of following the army through its war

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against the French, it explores the postwar, peacetime army in the West. Thedifference is an important one. The army during the Seven Years War wasbigger and better nanced than the peacetime force that followed. Redcoatsduring the war also engaged in campaigns that placed a premium on thearmys ghting skills; garrisons on the postwar frontier, in contrast, seldomengaged in tactical exercises or the large-scale operations that typied thebattalions of Amherst and Wolfe. And whereas these generals led armiesthat numbered in the thousands, western military forces rarely countedmore than a couple of hundred soldiers at any given place; regiments, evencompanies within regiments, were widely dispersed across a highly variablephysical and cultural landscape.

The questions that inform the following chapters, then, have less to dowith war than with peace, less to do with the details of tactics and militaryorganization than with what might be called the housekeeping associatedwith occupying and maintaining strong points on the outer limits of empire.Housekeeping seems to be a useful way of conceptualizing much of whatshaped military life in the West. Indeed, a theme that runs through the storyis how domestic and unmilitary these scattered garrisons were, and how mil-itary expectations and routines had to give way before the unique demandsof life beyond the settlements. Over time, in fact, forts and garrisons in theWest took on aspects similar to those rural civilian communities back east.

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2. Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander in chief in North America, 175963. (Courtesy of theWilliam L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.)

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1

The British Occupation of the West

The surrender of French forces at Montreal on September 8, 1760, broughtthe ghting in North America to an end. Nevertheless, for Sir JefferyAmhersts victorious armies there was still much to do: regiments had to beassigned winter quarters in Canada, provincial troops had to be sent home,and several thousand French and Canadian soldiers had to be disarmed,paroled, or held until they could be sent out of the colony as prisoners ofwar.

Equally important, news of the capitulation had to be carried to distantFrench outposts and those forts provided with British garrisons in order toensure, as Amherst later put it, a quiet possession of the whole of Canada.This task fell to Maj. Robert Rogers and his now-famous corps of rangers.With some 200 men, a Canadian guide, Joseph Poupao, dit La Fleur, andengineer Lt. Dietrich Brehm to take soundings and make maps, Rogers wasordered to cross the Great Lakes to Detroit, accept the towns surrender,then occupy as many of the outlying forts as he could.

It was a tall order. Winter came early in the pays den haut, and it was aregion inhabited by Indian societies that had been French allies and com-mercial partners for yearsthey were unlikely to welcome news that theirFrench father had been driven from Canada. On November 13 Rogersand his men left Montreal in a otilla of the light, maneuverable whaleboatsrangers favored. Ten days later, having passed through the stunning maze ofthe Thousand Islands, they landed at Cataraqui and made ready for the rstleg of their journey through the inland seas: the trip across Lake Ontarioto Fort Niagara.1

Crossing the Great Lakes in boats with only a few inches of freeboard wasaltogether different from the rangers forays down the narrow Champlaincorridor. An ofcer who crossed Lake Erie a year earlier found the expe-rience Extreamly Hazardous, and Dangerous since the slightest windwhipping across the shallow water produced high waves. Indeed, the rangerswere held up for two days at Cataraqui because of what Rogers called thetempestuousness of the weather, which brought alternating squalls of


2 british occupation of the west

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[2], (2)3. General Thomas Gage, commander in chief in North America, 176375. (Courtesy of theWilliam L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.)

snow and rain as well as dense fog. Altogether Rogerss force lost nine daystravel to foul weather during their seventy-two-day passage to Detroit.2

When Rogerss men arrived at Fort Niagara on October 2, the garrisonthere attempted to use draft horses to haul boats and bulk supplies up theLewiston escarpmentwith little success. The animals were so weakenedby lack of proper forage that soldiers were obliged to do the whole, andtheir labor resulted in ruptures, bruised backs, and exhaustion so severe thatmen were unable to do Any one thing for three Days after duty on theroad. The work was still not nished on October 5 when Rogers, fearingthat the winter season was now advancing very fast, left his men to followas best they could and hurried on with a small party to Fort Pitt, wherehe was to receive further orders from Gen. Robert Monckton and pick upadditional troops to man the new western garrisons.3

Following the south shore of Lake Erie, Rogerss party came rst to


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Fort Presque Isle; they then followed the Allegheny Valley to Fort Pitt andGeneral Monckton. Three days later, on October 20, the major was on hisway north, up the Allegheny, followed by Capt. Donald Campbell and 100men of the Royal American Regiment. By the end of October Rogers andCampbell were at Lake Erie, where they found the main body of rangersattempting to repair several boats damaged on the way from Niagara.

Campbells regulars, though hardened by long service in South Carolinaand the Ohio Country, had serious reservations about traveling across thechoppy lake, forcing Rogers to recommend to them not to mind thewaves of the lake but to stick to their oars. Even this was not enough;before leaving Presque Isle Rogers assigned his best steersmen to Camp-bells boats.4

The nal leg of the journey passed without incident, though crossing thecold and rough water must have proven mentally and physically exhausting.Finally, on November 29, Rogers reported that I drew up my detachmenton a eld of grass, and with as much pomp and ceremony as dirty, tiredtroops could muster, he accepted the surrender of Detroits small Frenchgarrison. For Rogers and his rangers their last mission was over; for Camp-bells redcoats and those who followed them, life on the far frontiers ofempire was just beginning.5

The Rogers expedition opened a new phase in the British armys Americanexperience. Before the surrender of Detroit, redcoats had only reached theouter margins of the pays den haut, at Fort Niagara and in the upper OhioValley. After 1760 a new western frontier of British America developed:at rst a wartime expedient, it was given further denition by the 1763Peace of Paris, which transferredwithout the consent of the natives livingtherenot only Canada but the Floridas and the Illinois Country to Britishsovereignty.

Occupying this new territory posed immediate challenges for the army.Under the best of circumstances movement to, and through, the West wasa physical hardship; at worst it could be hazardous, even life-threatening.Taking post at distant places like Fort Michilimackinac, Fort Chartres, orMobile required reliable transportation, which only emerged over time asthe army gained experience.

Needed, too, was knowledge of the West: its geography, weather, andresources as well as its peoples. Once past Niagara, Rogers and his menentered a region largely unknown to the British. The army gradually lledthe blanks on its mental map of the West. With the occasional help of



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local informants, colonial and Indian, a succession of army engineersBrehm, Bernard Ratzer, Thomas Hutchins, and Harry Gordon amongthemcharted the courses of the Niagara, Ohio, and Mississippi riversand the shores of the Great Lakes while taking note of the resources ofthe trans-Appalachian region. At the same time the army imposed its ownlandscape on the West as it moved over the Alleghenies and beyond theNiagara portage. Aided by improvements in transportation and a growingunderstanding of the region, redcoats built or occupied numerous fortstied together by roads, portages, sailing routes, and naval installations, allof which helped dene Britains armed frontier in America.

The greatest obstacle facing the army as it moved west was the sheerimmensity of the territory in its charge. The experiences of James Pitcherand his assistants typify the logistical difculties in traveling to, and through,the armed frontier. Whenever it could, the army moved men and materialsby water, though even this easiest form of travel posed problems. In the lateautumn of 1765 Capt. Thomas Stirlings detachment of the 42nd Foot, theRoyal Highland Regiment, took forty-seven days to travel the estimated1,278 miles down the Ohio River from Fort Pitt to Fort Chartres in theIllinois Country. Three years later the 34th Foot, ordered home from theIllinois, spent nine weeks pulling against the Ohios current before reach-ing Fort Pitt. Seasonal conditions also inuenced travel on the Ohio River.Merchant John Jennings made the passage from Pittsburgh to Fort Chartresin just thirty days in 1766, propelled by spring oods in March and currentsthat sent him downstreamby his estimationat anywhere from twentyto sixty miles a day. Later that same year engineer Capt. Harry Gordonspent fty-three days on the same route. Gordon left Fort Pitt on a swift,deep current easily able to carry boats with seven tons of supplies aboard.Two weeks later, at the mouth of the Scioto River, Gordons leasurelyTrip abruptly ended when his convoy encountered the low water typicalof midsummer, a problem that continued to the mouth of the Ohio. Thesesame conditions could add days, even weeks, to upriver travel.6

Beyond Fort Chartres, the Mississippi River offered challenges of itsown. Draining half the continent, its current could carry men downstreamat speeds unimaginable on land. John Jennings arrived at New Orleansa distance estimated at 963 milesin just fteen days. Captain Gordonmade it downstream in twenty-six days in a current of three to ve knots.Upstream, against such force, travel was altogether different. Maj. ArthurLoftus, armed with information on the river and its peoples supplied byFrench ofcers at New Orleans, was ordered to occupy the Illinois Country.



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He left the city with his 22nd Regiment on February 27, 1764. Strugglingagainst the current, suffering the mass desertion of his sick, malnourishedmen (perhaps bound for the dubious sanctuary of New Orleans or nearbynative towns), Loftus was stopped by the Tunicas near Roche dAvion.When nally defeated by river and natives, Loftuss force had progressedroughly 200 miles upriver in twenty-three daysfewer than nine miles aday. The following year, Maj. Robert Farmar and the 34th Regiment nallysucceeded where Loftus had failed. Referring to the Hardships and im-mense Difculties of what he termed, with decided understatement, thistedious passage, Farmar reported his arrival at Fort Chartres on December2, 1765, after a trip of ve months and ve days. Farmars was the last majorexpedition up the Mississippi; all subsequent troops movements and supplyconvoys used the longer but faster Ohio River route.7

To the north British troops faced equally great distances. While theGreat Lakes offered easy access to the interior, travel here, too, was bettermeasured in weeks than in miles. Traveling from Cataraqui at the east-ern end of Lake Ontario, it took Rogerss expedition thirty days to reachDetroit, with another month consumed by the majors trip to Fort Pitt.Three weeks seems to have been the average travel time from Niagara toDetroit, including the trek over the Niagara portage, which alone couldtake anywhere from a couple of days to a week or more. By 1765 it tooksome forty-eight days to travel from the east end of Lake Ontario as far asFort Michilimackinac, then the western limit of British occupation. Fur-ther, as the rangers discovered, changes in the weather or the seasons couldcomplicate travel across the lakes. Royal Indian Superintendent Sir WilliamJohnson was forced to remain at Fort Niagara during the summer of 1761,awaiting boatloads of supplies needed for an important Indian congress atDetroit. The boats arrived eleven days behind schedule due to storms andadverse winds. Foul winds also added to Capt. John Montresors difcul-ties in 1763 as he attempted to lead reinforcements to Detroit, then undersiege by Pontiacs Indian coalition.8

Rogers was able to make his way to Fort Pitt thanks to newly built fortsand a well-marked, if not always accessible, system of roads and streams.The main route into the Ohio Country, however, remained Forbess Road.In early 1762 Col. William Eyre, sent to inspect ood damage at FortPitt, made the 200-mile trip from Carlisle to Pittsburgh on horseback intwelve days. Four years later missionary Charles Beatty, heading for theDelaware towns in the Muskingum Valley of Ohio, spent ten days on theroad in midsummer. An alternate route from the settlements, using the


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the upper Potomac River and the old Braddock Road north of Winchester,allowed summer travelers to reach Pittsburgh in fourteen days, roughly thesame time necessary to make the journey down Forbess Road.9

By any calculation, the scope of operations in the West was unlike any-thing in the armys previous experience. In Britain garrisons and patrolswere distributed along the coasts to combat smuggling or stationed in theinterior of Ireland and Scotland to watch over potentially rebellious peoples.In each case garrisons were, at most, a day or two apart. Even during theSeven Years War, regiments and companies normally served together orwere stationed within easy reach of land-bound or waterborne support. Bycontrast, Captain Campbells Royal Americans at Detroit were separatedby days of hard travel in poorly charted country and virtually isolated inthe depths of winter. Their comrades at Fort Pitt and its tiny outposts weretied to the settlements by a single road, often impossible for wagons orpackhorses to travel in winter or in heavy rain. And British troops, perchedon the humid banks of the Mississippi, found themselves weeks or monthsfrom the nearest help, while downriver on the gulf, redcoats stood guardover windswept beaches devoid of civilians. Under such circumstances, thearmys disposition in the West after 1760 took on the aspect not of a well-dened military zone such as existed in Flanders or across the Great Glenin Scotland, but of small enclaves imbedded along a broad arc of land andwater stretching from the western Great Lakes to Mobile Bay.10

The great distances separating garrisons from each other and fromsources of supply complicated the armys occupation of the West; so, too,did the conditions of lakes, rivers, and roads. Over the decade and a halfafter 1760, however, military travelers enjoyed modest improvements asmodes of transportation changed, as civilian settlements along favoredroutes increased, and as the army learned more about western conditions.

The armys oldest route west, Forbess Road, continued to be one of themost heavily traveled. Built by British and provincial forces in 1758, the roadbegan at Carlisle and followed older trading paths along the Juniata Valley.Once beyond the headwaters of the Juniata, however, the narrow dirt roadsnaked its way over a succession of steep, heavily wooded ridges. Engineerstried to follow the best possible route for wagons and gun carriages: cuttingswitchbacks, corduroying the road through Edmunds Swamp, and buildingprotective redoubts at places where exhausted teams and escorts could turnoff for water and rest. Forbess Road was, in its own way, an engineeringmarvelan American version of the military roads built through the High-lands of Scotland a generation earlier.11



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This highway to the West was most often a nightmare of inclines, steepslides, and narrow rutted tracks that together added up to an exhausting,sometimes dangerous, journey. Moravian missionary John Heckewelderdoubtless spoke for many who took to the road in the early 1760s when,upon catching sight of Fort Pitt, he felt as if relieved from an insupportableweight and rejoiced that we again found ourselves in the company ofthe living. Col. William Eyre viewed the road with the critical eye of anengineer. He was unimpressed by what he found. The road up and acrossSidling Hill was very bad and all the more dangerous because the westside of the ridge had too few zig zags(i.e., switchbacks). At Stoney Creekwest of Fort Bedford, the road was extreamly bad, both stony and swampy,in places so very terrible as to surprise one How the Waggons got on. Helearned, in fact, that few wagon convoys attempted to cross this stretch ofroad. The story was the same near Fort Ligonier, the road again excessivelybad, soggy and strewn with stones, though it began to improve a bit as Eyreneared Bushy Run and the last leg of his trip into Pittsburgh.12

Forbess Road was excessively bad because it had been so heavily trav-eled. In the aftermath of the French retreat from the Ohio Country, theBritish army pushed hundreds of men and thousands of tons of food andequipment down the road toward the Ohio. Far from a wilderness trail,the road in its early years was a congested highway: packhorses and wag-ons moving up and down country in a steady stream in fair weather andfoul, churning the narrow track into a quagmire, weakening already fragilebridges and causing further erosion along the uphill passages. This occurredat the same time that labor devoted to maintenance was rapidly diminishingbecause troops were occupied with building Fort Pitt. After 1763 troop re-ductions all but ended repairs on the road. In June 1766 engineer Gordonpredicted that the road, being so extreamly bad, would be most probablyimpassable for Carriages by the following summer.13

Thus while Eyre, Heckewelder, or the many military expresses thattraveled the road on foot or horseback could usually make the trip fromCarlisle to Fort Pitt in less than two weeks in the 1760s, the story was muchdifferent for columns of troops or their indispensable convoys of supplies.Under favorable conditions, Gen. John Forbes calculated, we allow 42days for the Horses to go from Carlisle to Pittsburgh, and return again.The problem, of course, was that conditions along the road were rarelyfavorable. Equipment was seldom in good order, wagons so badly ttedout, according to Gordon, that the Drivers can hardly prevent runningagainst every Tree in the Road. Early thaws meant adequate forage but


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5. General Forbes Marching Journal to the Ohio by John Potts, showing the route of ForbessRoad. (Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Shippen Collection, Philadelphia.)



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also brought swollen creeks that held up trafc or drowned men foolishor impatientenough to try the fords. In autumn and winter a lack offorage led to starving draft animals and frostbitten escorts. Indeed, in thedepth of winter Fort Pitt, like the forts on the Great Lakes, was all butcut off from the outside world. At all seasons of the year, garrison ofcersfaced teamsters complaining bitterly against the road. The sheer size andnumber of ridges to cross were the worst obstacles. It took one convoy eighthours to reach the summit of Allegheny Mountain, a feat that required theutmost invention . . . to surmount the Aerial Heights of the ridge. As badas such trips were for drivers, they were murderous for horses, which diedby the score from overwork and malnutrition. At Fort Bedford Capt. LewisOurrey reported that losses among packhorses were as high as 60 percent,while John Heckewelder found the road well marked by a large numberof carcasses of horses that had been dragged off to the side after they hadcollapsed in harness.14

A decade after Eyre and Heckewelder made their way west, ForbessRoad could still pose daunting challengesat least to the uninitiated. Mis-sionary David McClure wrote of clambering mountains along a zig zagor serpentine path and rejoiced at the divine protection that brought himsafely to Pittsburgh. Yet much had changed. Charles Beatty made his waythrough a land lling up with people. Rather than the howling wildernesslled only with blackened ruins of houses and barns produced by a decadeof vicious border warfare, Beatty found in 1766 that he could travel fromone prospering village to the next, preaching to local inhabitants, stoppingfor the night at one of the many taverns along the roadway. By then travelon the road was a common, everyday affair; army couriers from Fort Pittroutinely journeyed east carrying mail to the Lancaster post ofce, whileparties of recruits, messengers, and merchants made their way west to theOhio and beyond.15

Another road into the West had been opened in 1755 when Gen. Ed-ward Braddock led a small army toward Fort Duquesne by way of the Po-tomac Valley, Fort Cumberland, and the Youghiogheny River. In the wakeof his crushing defeat, Braddocks Road, a southern portal to the Ohio,was slammed shut by the French, not to be reopened until 1759. Seekinga faster, cheaper alternative to Forbess Road, the army fortied RedstoneCreek, determined to use the lower Monongahela River instead of the im-mense (and immensely expensive) land Carriage from Carlisle. In sodoing the army drew on the rich farmlands of western Maryland and thelower Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The price, however, was intercolonial



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rivalry, as Pennsylvania and Virginia each strove to monopolize the routewest. As early as 1758 at the height of his campaign against the French,Forbes had to contend with the distracting lobbying of colonels GeorgeWashington and William Byrd III, both of whom pressed the general toabandon the new road through Pennsylvania in favor of Braddocks Road,which also led in the direction of lands coveted by the Ohio Company ofVirginia. Forbes was disgusted by their Scheme against this new road,which he believed was a shame for any ofcer to countenance. Never-theless, the tug-of-war continued, forcing a perplexed Col. Henry Bouquetto complain in 1760 of being caught between the two colonies. Convincedthat maintaining both roads was impossible, he suggested a compromise bywhich the roads would be linked in such a way as to avoid the worst stretchesof Forbess Road over Sidling Hill. While the army ultimately relied on thePennsylvania route, with its direct link to headquarters in New York andthe rich markets of Philadelphia, Braddocks Road continued to serve asa conduit for supplies and people, many of them illegal squatters bent ontaking Indian lands.16

Forbess Road remained so important to the army because the only al-ternate route into the Ohio Countryby way of Lake Erieultimatelyproved to be impractical. As Rogers, Bouquet, and others who had to maketheir way through the Allegheny Valley discovered, the route was a tangleof difculties born of weather, seasonal change, and geography. In fact,in 1753 the passage between Presque Isle and the Allegheny River nearlydefeated French efforts to occupy the Ohio Country. British soldiers, afterstruggling to master the overland and river routes north of Fort Pitt, nallygave up; the small outposts that guarded this avenue, destroyed during the1763 Indian war, were never reoccupied, and the Allegheny route was nallyabandoned.17

The reasons for this are made clear by the experiences of the soldiersordered to clear and fortify the route beginning in the summer of 1760.Efforts by Virginia and Pennsylvania provincials to rebuild French fortsVenango, Le Boeuf, and Presque Isle were continually hampered by sea-sonal uctuations in the Allegheny River and French Creek.

In late July 1760 General Monckton took advantage of heavy rains andrising river levels to send troops upstream to Venango. Little more thana week later, Lt. Robert Stewart learned from local Munsees that it wasimpossible for anything longer than a Bark Canoe to go beyond Venango.Moreover, the trek from Fort Pitteleven days to cover 112 miles of riverinterrupted by shoals, bars, and rockshad left Stewarts men much tter



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for an Hospital than their normal duties. A month later Stewart and hissick stranded troops found great Joy in the rising river and the promiseof a quick trip upriver to French Creek. That same rising water nearlyspelled doom for a supply convoy on its way down swollen French Creek;the soldiers were forced to wade to their Chins through a torrent thatalmost drowned one man. Overland travel by way of the Venango Pathand other native thoroughfares was not a solution for strangers like thesesoldiers. Without Indian guidesor experienced woodsmen like RogerssRangersa Soldier could Scarce have had a chance to reach Pittsburghfrom its northern outposts. This was especially true in winter, when lake-effect snows could quickly bury trail markers and sudden freezes couldcompletely stop waterborne trafc. As a result of these difculties, the short-lived outposts along the Allegheny corridor became more closely tied to theGreat Lakes garrisonsespecially Fort Niagarathan to Fort Pitt.18

The development of an effective transportation system was equally vitalto the survival of the new garrisons in the Great Lakes basin, though thechallenges were of a different sort. Here, great distances and the weatherproved to be major obstacles as did, of course, Niagara Falls.

The light, swift whaleboats used by the rangers proved inadequate onthe lakes. Fragile craft, they were prone to damage in shallow water and inheavy weather; ideal for carrying lightly armed troops on scouts and raids,the boats could not carry the tons of supplies needed at the forts. By 1763bateaux and fully rigged ships had become the mainstays of transport andcommunication throughout the lakes region.

The armys early workhorse on the lakesand on the Ohio and Missis-sippi riverswas the bateau, a vessel that, like much else in the colonies,reected European adaptation to North American conditions, speci-cally, the need to haul bulk cargo over interior waterways under conditionsthat would tax lighter craft, including native canoes. Peter Kalm, a Swedishnaturalist who traveled through British America and New France in 1750,left the most complete description of the bateau. Made of pine boards, theboat was at-bottomed, that they may row better in shallow water. Theyare sharp at both ends . . . and are rowed as common boats. They also hada low freeboard; Kalm estimated the height from the bottom to the toppof the almost vertical sides to be no more than two feet. Though the Englishbateaux that Kalm described at Albany may have varied in size and materialfrom those built in Canada, the bateau of about twenty-four feet in lengthand some three to four feet in the beam appears to have been commonlyused by the army on the Great Lakes.19



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The bateau could also be built quickly and inexpensively by unskilledcarpenters, a considerable advantage for an army often short of skilled ship-wrights. Bouquet learned that six men could build a twenty-four-foot bateauin just two daysprovided they had an adequate supply of nails and oakumfor caulking the seams. And unlike canoes which, according to Kalm, breakeasily and . . . cannot carry a great cargo, the bateau could, by Bouquetsaccount, easily carry Sixteen or seventeen Barrells of provisionsnearlyhalf a ton. Moreover, the larger boatsup to thirty-four feet longcouldcarry twenty men in addition to fteen barrels of supplies.20

Cheap, capacious, and easy to build, the bateau also had some drawbacksas a Great Lakes transport. Though it could be equipped with a small sail,the craft normally required as many as six men on the oars and tiller, makingit labor intensive. Under oars alone, a loaded bateau required a week or moreof hard labor to make the trip across Lake Erie from the Niagara River toDetroit. In addition, while the bateau could carry a ton or more of cargo,the constant demands raised by far-ung garrisons for meat, our, iron, andammunition meant that many boats would be needed in regular service, afurther drain on manpower and materials. Finally, its light construction andlow freeboard made it vulnerable in rough weather. Thus while the bateaucontinued in use on the lakes, its work was increasingly taken over by thelarger ships of the Naval Department.

The Naval Department, like the armed frontier it served, was a productof the Seven Years War. Waterborne transport became essential as theBritish army attempted to seize control of the defended corridors into theheart of New France: the Champlain Valley, lower Great Lakes, and St.Lawrence River. Led by experienced naval ofcers like Commodore JoshuaLoring and army ofcers with maritime experience such as Capt. AlexanderGrant of the 77th Foot, the Naval Department undertook to supply thearmys demand for sailing vessels; by 1763 it consisted of two principaldivisions: one on Lake Champlain, the other on the Great Lakes and dividedinto two administrative districts: Lake Ontario and the upper lakes. In early1763 six vessels were serving on the lakes: a sloop and schooner on Lake Erieand two sloops and two snows on the vital Lake Ontario passage that boundup-country posts with their base of supply in Canada. Altogether, someseventeen ships served the army on the Great Lakes before the AmericanRevolution.21

Many of the vessels that served on the upper lakes were built at thearmys dockyard facility on Navy Island in the Niagara River, one of anetwork of posts established to control trafc across the Niagara portage.



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Employing civilian shipwrights and soldier-laborers drawn from nearbyFort Niagara, Navy Island was by 1763 a complex of sawpits, storehouses,barracks, and wharves. It served as the principal naval depot during the1760s. In 1770, however, administration and shipbuilding were moved toDetroit, a reection of that growing communitys role as the center ofcommerce and British rule on the upper lakes. Even so, the posts alongthe Niagara River, especially Fort Erie after 1764, continued to serve asentrepts and wintering facilities for ships and crews.22

The Naval Departments greatest assets were speed and economy. Itsships under full sail with a good wind could, according to Loring, makethe trip from Fort Erie to Detroit in three days. The ships could carrytons of bulk cargo. The schooner Huron, built at Navy Island in 1761,was rated at eighty tons; it could carry more supplies to the western fortsthan dozens of bateaux and, with a crew of sixteen, was more efcient tooperate than the smaller craft. The ships were just as vulnerable to badweather, decay, and accidents, however. Despite the efforts of shipwrights,the vessels were often out of repair and needed constantand costlyattention. The armys estimates for the department in 1766 included 4,81518s. 9d., of which 3,779 3s. 5d. was for skilled labor. The sloop Michigan,also built in 1761, was judged the following year to be good for only twomore years. Four other vessels inspected in 1762 needed repairs rangingfrom new masts or caulking to complete overhauls and were deemed untfor carrying armaments.23 One vessel went down in Lake Erie in September1763; two years later, while carrying supplies to Fort Niagara, the sloopMississauga was lost on Lake Ontario. And in 1768 the Charlottehavingsurvived earlier mishaps including a broken anchor that sent it careeningthrough the rapids near Fort Eriewas blown ashore and damaged by astorm on Lake Erie.

The dangers of Great Lakes navigation were compounded by other prob-lems. Ships laid up for the winter made tempting shelters for travelers; theschooner Boston burned at her moorings above Niagara Falls in October1768, apparently when passing French traders went aboard for the nightand ignited the ship with their cooking res. The threat of re came fromother sources as well. Lt. Patrick Sinclair of the Naval Department warnedthat vessels moored at Fort Erie were in danger of being destroyed each timelocal Mississaugas routinely burned over the adjacent marshlands. Therewere other hazards that came with pack ice or shoal water, which could crackhulls or damage keels, while hot, dry weather dried out timbers. Altogether,ve ships were lost or dismantled for salvage before 1776.24



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Whether in small boats or in ships, men and supplies moving acrossthe lakes faced unpredictable challenges. Although movement improvedwith time and experience, as the fates of the Charlotte, Mississauga, andcountless small craft attest, travel through this part of the West was nevereasy. Even the changing of the seasons could pose special challenges for thearmy, especially its quartermasters. Charged with getting supplies to distantgarrisons at places like La Baye (Green Bay, Wisconsin) or Fort Miamis,inland from Detroit, and keeping trafc moving through the lakes, ofcershad to contend with the fact that, given their enormous area, the lakesopened and closed at widely different times during the year. Lake Erie wasjudged safe for navigation after mid-April, but lakes Huron and Michiganwould normally be closed for another month, and Lake Superior was notconsidered accessible until mid-June. Likewise, the upper lakes becameunsafe earlier in the autumn: Lake Superior by the end of September, whileLake Erie could still be crossedat some riskuntil late November. Takentogether, the armys active season was effectively limited to a period fromearly May until late October; isolation for weeks during the winter becamea routine, if unwelcome, part of garrison life on the lakes.25

No other feature in the Great Lakes basin inspired as much commentor posed as many difculties for the armyas Niagara Falls. A regimentalsurgeon visited the falls four times during his rst year at Fort Niagaraand was delighted to always discover new beauties in the water and rocks.Capt. Lewis Ourry, who knew the falls only from others descriptions, calledthem one of the greatest Natural curiosities in the World; French cap-tain Pierre Pouchot compared the falls favorably to those he had seen inSwitzerland.26

Below the falls the river passed through a narrow gorge, in places over300 feet deep, for seven miles until it reached the edge of the NiagaraEscarpment. From there the river cut its way through a broad, level, andwooded plain for another six miles until it emptied into Lake Ontario be-neath the walls of Fort Niagara. It was the rst stretch of the lower riverthe gorgethat blocked the armys movement through the lakes. TheBritish discovered, as Mississaugas and Senecas before them had learned,that the only way past the falls was to scale the escarpment. The geographyof the Niagara River thus represented what soldiers then knew as a dele:a straight narrow passage through which troops were compelled to marchin close columns, vulnerable to ambush; like a dele, the portage constrictedand slowed military trafc through the lakes.27

In July 1759, when an army led by Gen. John Prideaux and Sir William



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Johnson took Fort Niagara, the British inherited the French portage net-work, which then consisted of a collection of storehouses atop the escarp-ment, the road, and a small stockade at the southern end of the road, abovethe falls. During the next several years the army put its own stamp on theportage, adding fortications, improving the road, and maintaining the baseon Navy Island. In the process, carriage along the portage was improved,made safer and more predictable as engineers found ways to lessen theburdens of what still remained the most demanding passage the army usedin the West.

Initially local garrisons had to make do with few resources in operatingthe portage. Col. William Eyre, Niagaras commander in 1760, complainedthat the few horses were weak from lack of forage and so little Accus-tomd to [portaging] as to be scarcely of Any Service. Inevitably it fell toEyres troops to do the whole. The situation remained unchanged formonths. The Royal Americans who relieved Eyres garrison in mid-1760were no better off despite the arrival of wagons and fresh horses from thearmys base at Fort Ontario. In fact, the draft animals only compoundedMaj. William Walterss problems. Very poor and almost tired out, thesenags suffered all the more since Major Walterss troops had little time tocollect fodder. This vicious cycle continued through the winter and into thenew year, as horses died for lack of food and shelter. Meanwhile, the dif-culties on the portage were magnied by General Amhersts preoccupationwith settling garrisons into French forts to the west. By midsummer 1761the tempo along the portage increased dramatically as troops and materielwere moved to the lakes. Major Walters apologized for a hasty report byexplaining that We are greatly Hurryd in getting Maj. Henry GladwinsBatteaus & provisions over the Landing and have not one momentstime to spare from labor that consumed most of the four companies ofRoyal Americans as well as Gladwins 300 troops. Walters may have beenfeeling particularly vexed at that moment: he had recently taken receiptof new freight wagons only to discover that they had been sent withoutharnesses.28

Despite the early setbacks, time and hard experience allowed the armyto sort out portage operations and control the ow of trafc to the west-ern outposts. To Walterss relief, engineer Lt. George Demler was ableto modify artillery harnesses well enough to keep light wagons movingalong the portage road. More important, Lieutenant Demler urged thatthe emaciated horses be replaced by slower but sturdier oxen which, he



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argued, would be of better Service and Easier maintained. By the springof 1762 Waltersat some risk to his own pursepurchased four of thebeasts and was delighted to nd that they could haul loads equal to thosepulled by sixty of his overworked Royal Americans. Later that year, as drafthorses continued to die, Walterss oxen had all but taken over the heavywork of pulling bateaux and supplies along the maze of tracks that led tothe top of the escarpment. Even winter snow and ice no longer threatenedoperations; locally fashioned sleighs allowed the teams to keep working aslong as fodder lasted.29

At the same time the portage was being transformed into a network offorts and facilities designed to ensure its security and enhance its usefulnessto the army. In addition to Navy Island, the old French post above thefalls was rebuilt as Fort Schlosser, after Capt. John Joseph Schlosser of theRoyal Americans, who rst commanded there. At the escarpmentwhat theBritish called the lower landing to distinguish it from Schlossers upperposta complex of storehouses and stockaded fortications took shape,eventually known, perhaps facetiously, as Mount Pleasant. Finally, in 1764Gen. John Bradstreets army further strengthened the portage defenses byerecting Fort Erie at the south end of the Niagara River as well as bybuilding a chain of stockaded redoubts along the road itself. The Niagaraportage became one of the most heavily fortied places on the frontier.30

The most innovativeand from the soldiers standpoint perhaps themost welcomedevelopment on the portage was the incline used to haulboats and cargoes up the escarpment. Long attributed to engineer Lt. JohnMontresor, who designed the redoubts and Fort Erie in 1764, the tramwayhad its origins at least two years earlier as local ofcers struggled to over-come the logistical logjam on the portage. In the fall of 1762 Niagarascommander ordered that a truck or Carriage be constructed with run-ners to carry up 2 or 3 Barrels at a time, or a Batteau. Two or three men, bythe use of a Cable and large Wheel, could pull the cargo up the track. At thesame time troops were set to work leveling the river bank at the foot of thecliffs to make shifting goods from ship to shore easier. Montresor improvedthis arrangement, running what became known as cradles from the riverto the fortications atop Mount Pleasant, bypassing altogether the sinuoustrail up the escarpment. The system was still operating in the late 1760s,now under civilian management, and the machines were still impressiveenough to provoke comments from passing travelers. As military activityon the lakes subsided and fell into routine, however, the cradles, like much



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else on the armed frontier, began to deteriorate; in 1772 army headquartersagreed that new machinery would be needed if the remaining portion ofthe tramway was to remain in service.31

As the army moved west it necessarily tried to make sense of the physical andhuman geography in encountered. Indeed, once beyond the Alleghenies orLake Ontario, British knowledge of the lands, climates, and peoples theyhad inherited through war was very limited at best. True, army ofcershad John Mitchells and Lewis Evanss famous maps of the Middle West asguides, but these were a decade old by the mid-1760s. Moreover, Britishcartographers information came from colonial traders and travelers whoseown knowledge of the West was limited to native customers and clouded bythe tensions between France and Britain in the 1740s and 1750s, which dis-couraged exploration. The upper Great Lakes and Gulf Coast were knownlargely through secondhand accounts, as was the Mississippi valley. As aresult, movement west by redcoats beyond Fort Pitt and the Niagara River,or to Mobile and Pensacola bays, constituted an exploratory process as thearmy encountered and learned to adjust to new lands and conditions.

Through observation and experience as well as from information sup-plied by natives and local French and Spanish settlers, army ofcers beganto construct a coherent picture of the lands they entered, picking up detailsabout the complex seasonal rhythms of travel through the Great Lakes orwhen rivers were likely to be suitable for heavy trafc. Soldiers observationsalso suggest the sorts of interests and imperatives that determined how theywould see the West. Rogers and others were impressed with the lands southof Lake Erie and made special note of its meadows, abundant fresh waterand, most of all, the stands of timber: white, black, and yellow oak, . . .walnut, cyprus, chestnut, and locust trees.32

Rogerss impression of a bountiful region was echoed by other observers;the majors engineer, Deitrich Brehm, found the lands around Sandusky fullof Wines [sic], Aples, Haythornes, and other Fruits of all sorts. He was alsopleased to report that the lands surrounding Detroit could easily supporta garrison with winter wheat, corn, apples, pearseven vines transplantedfrom France seemed to thrive. Capt. Donald Campbell agreed, adding thatDetroit sat in a most Beautifull Country . . . and every Thing in greatPlenty before this last year.33

Initial word from West Florida also waxed enthusiastic. Based on infor-mation from his quartermaster general, Lt. Col. James Robertson, Gen.Thomas Gage was inspired to report that the gulf climate was whole-



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some and that the inhabitants enjoy as much health . . . as in any part ofAmerica, since Florida is subject to no Epidemical disorder. What Gagefailed to understand was that Robertsons report cited conditions prevailingduring the winter of 1763; as local garrisons would soon discover, summerand autumn typically were times of sickness and death.34

Yet while most initial impressions of the frontier painted an encouragingpicture, not everyone was impressed. Perhaps struck more by the distanceshe traveled and the physical isolation of his new home than by the majestyof forests and falls, Captain Schlosser wrote from Niagara of our exile,a view doubtless shared by many of his soldiers, whose knowledge of theWest was even less expansive than that of their more privileged ofcers.35

Struck by the profound contrasts between the settled colonies and thefrontier and by the sheer size of the western country, army ofcers beganto collect practical information about their new homes. Captain Camp-bells early enthusiasm about Detroit gave way somewhat as he learnedthat There is noe dependance on the lake during the winter and thathe and his men would be largely isolated in a French and Indian world.Indeed, as he struggled to learn about his neighbors, Campbell expressedhis concern upon meeting Wyandots, as we did not know what Receptionwe were to have.36 On his return from Detroit, Brehm made a point ofnoting the location of native towns along the south shore of Lake Erie,while troops sent to the Illinois Country in 1765 likewise took notice ofthe French and Indian settlements around Fort Chartres. Capt. ThomasStirling quickly learned, for example, that peaceful occupation of so distanta post meant dealing with the local population According to the Laws andCustoms of the Country. Maj. Arthur Loftus was urged to follow theFrench Method of giving gifts to natives he encountered on his abortivetrip up the Mississippi in 1764. On the distant Gulf Coast, largely devoidof Indian and European settlers, the initial lessons were largely geographic.The new garrison bound for Mobile discovered to its dismay that sandbarsand shoals made entry into the bay hazardous without skilled pilots and thattransports could not sail farther than nine miles from the fort; the redcoatswould have to take to small boats and oars or march overland to reach theirnew home.37

The army also collected information on the West in a more systematicfashion, by dispatching exploratory missions to survey, map, and reporton lakes, rivers, and native peoples. The Rogers expedition was the rst ofthese. Lieutenant Brehm kept his own record of the journey, the routes trav-eled, and details of land and people intended to aid subsequent occupation



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of the region. General Amherst planned for Rogers and Brehm to continueinto the upper lakes, but bad weather and an uncertain reception by nativeskept them from venturing beyond Detroit. Nevertheless, Brehms journalincluded much valuable information: the rst detailed British account ofthe Niagara passage, a sketch map of Lake Erie, and notes on his route, thesurrounding countryside, and the Indian inhabitants.38

Brehm had better luck the following year when he accompanied troopssent to complete the occupation of the upper lakes. That summer Maj.Henry Gladwin of the 80th Foot left for his new command at Detroit withhis own regiment, more Royal Americans, and Indian Superintendent SirWilliam Johnson. In early September 1761, Gladwin ordered Capt. HenryBalfour of the 80th to continue beyond Detroit, taking new garrisons ofRoyal Americans for the French posts at Michilimackinac, La Baye, andoutposts south of Lake Michigan. Equally important, Balfours expeditionwould represent the armys rst look at the western Great Lakes. The re-sults of the expedition were rendered in two maps, most likely preparedby Brehm, that provided detailed information not only of the eastern sideof the Michigan peninsula and the important Straits of Mackinac, but ofnorthern Lake Michigan and far-off La Baye. Moreover, the so-called Bal-four Expedition Maps included the courses of the Maumee and St. Josephsrivers southwest of Detroit. Brehms work meant that the commander inchief would have fresh and accurate information about the western lakes.39

Ens. Thomas Hutchins of the Royal Americans also helped enlargeBritish understanding of the pays den haut. Acting for Deputy Indian Su-perintendent George Croghan, Hutchins left Fort Pitt on a journey tonative towns that took him down the Ohio River, then across country toSandusky, on to Detroit, and around the Michigan peninsula to La Baye.He returned by way of the St. Josephs River, overland to the Ohio, thenon to Fort Pitt. From April to September 1762, Hutchins attempted togauge the cultural geography and political temper of natives living southof Lake Erie. The information he gathered on the land and waterways be-came the basis of his now-famous A Tour from Fort Cumberland North-westward. Perhaps based in part on information gained from the Bal-four expedition, Hutchinss account nevertheless provided much newanddauntinginformation. His map lled in details of Lake Michigans easternshore, and his calculations conrmed the vast extent of the upper country.The accompanying narrative provided descriptions of the landscape, thelocation of river crossings, and evaluations of the lands qualities and re-sources. More important still, Hutchins included a detailed account of the



[21], (21)

Lines: 186 to 196


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Indian towns he visited, the number of ghting menwhich he estimatedat over 4,600and their widespread dissatisfaction with British conductsince the conquest of New France.40

By the spring of 1763, then, the army had amassed a considerable storeof information about the pays den haut. In the meantime, similar effortswere under way in other parts of the West. Entering the gulf coastal re-gion, naval and army ofcers had the benet of two generations of Frenchcartography to guide them; settling into Mobile and Pensacola was largelya matter of rening information on ship channels, tribes, and the oftenvolatile weather that swept the gulf. Yet the army did make a contributionof its own when engineers produced detailed surveys of the Iberville Riverduring an abortive attempt to open an alternate passage to the MississippiRiver.41

The lower Ohio Valley and the Mississippi River were, like the GreatLakes, largely unknown to the army. The efforts to garrison the IllinoisCountry between 1763 and 1765 required information about the land, theIndians, the local French population, and, especially about the two greatrivers the redcoats would have to use to enter and remain in the region. Ac-cordingly, in 1766 engineers Harry Gordon and Thomas Hutchins traveleddown the Ohio to Fort Chartres, then on to New Orleans, taking soundingsand noting the currents as they went. The result was Hutchinss importantThe Courses of the Ohio River, the rst English account of the river belowPittsburgh. Earlier, Lt. John Ross had made the trip up the Mississippi tothe Illinois Country. Based on his own observations and those of Frenchexplorers and traders, he gave the army a detailed survey in his map Courseof the River Mississippi. Capt. Philip Pittman wrote The Present State ofthe European Settlements on the Mississippi, which provided the rst com-plete picture of that portion of Britains American empire. Thus as redcoatsventured into the West they did so on aided by a gradual accumulationof current information, much of it based on deliberate surveys by trainedengineers.42

The British occupation of the West occurred and changed over time, neverconforming to any preconceived plan. Instead, the network of garrisons androutes evolved between 1760 and 1774, expanding at some times and places,contracting at others; at no moment could its development be consideredxed or complete. Neither did western garrisons represent a contiguousline of fortications. Rather, soldiers found themselves inhabiting enclavesin other peoples lands, small symbols of Britains claim to sovereignty.



[22], (22)

Lines: 196 to 203


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The nature of the armys presence in the West was a reection not somuch of British strength as of weakness. Far from the center of state powerin Britain as well as the settled periphery of the empire in America, theWest that the army attempted to control was a region at the very limitof the kings writa place where British authority, though assumed, wasof questionable validity. Driven by an urgent need to impose order on anill-dened and volatile region, Amherst, for example, quickly decided toblanket the Great Lakes basin with garrisons. Later, the declining numberof forts and soldiers on the frontier after 1765 reected a growing awareness,both at army headquarters in America and at Whitehall, of the armys veryreal limitations in the face of vast distances, numerous Indian and colonialpeoples, and shrinking resources. In both cases the shifting conguration ofthe armed frontier depended largely upon imperial policies that were oftendeveloped contingently in response to relations with native peoples.43

Within months of the surrender of Detroit, Amherst mounted a majoreffort to complete the occupation of the West. On the lakes convoys ofbateaux, joined by the new vessels of the Naval Department, carried moun-tains of supplies to the new base of operations for the upper lakes, Detroit. Inmidsummer an important expedition left Fort Niagara. Three hundred menof the 80th Light Infantry, distinctive in their short brown coats and blackfelt jockey caps, were to escort Royal Americans and Sir William Johnsonto Detroit. From there the troops, led by the 80ths major, Henry Gladwin,would be sent out to former French posts at St. Joseph, Ouiatenon, Miamis,Michilimackinac, Sault Ste. Marie, and far-off La Baye. To help secure thepassage across Lake Erie, troops from Gen. Robert Moncktons force atPittsburgh would erect a new fort at Sandusky.

These efforts were complicated by more than the weather and limitedtransportation. While his orders were being sent out to Monckton, Glad-win, and other ofcers, Amherst had to confront the fact that his armyin America was growing smaller even as its responsibilities expanded. Theconquest of New France did not end the Seven Years War. Far to the southBritish forces were gathering for assaults on Frances rich Caribbean sugarislands. General Monckton would soon leave the Ohio Country to lead thisamphibious attack, taking with him eleven battalions of seasoned Britishinfantry from North Americanearly half of Amhersts force. Of the re-maining troops, most would have to remain in Canada to watch over some70,000 newly conquered subjects. So stretched were Amhersts resourcesthat western duty fell largely to a single battalion, Bouquets of the Royal



[23], (23)

Lines: 203 to 213


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Americans, augmented by whatever troops could be temporarily sparedfrom occupation duties elsewhere.44

The armys manpower problem only grew worse. In 1762 Spain enteredthe war as a French ally, and troops that had recently taken the islands ofGuadeloupe and Martinique were now diverted to an attack on Havana.Worse, campaigning in the tropics resulted in high levels of death andsickness from malaria, yellow fever, and scurvy, reducing Amhersts once-capable regiments to bands of invalids. Four of his regiments returned fromCuba numbering only 2,128 menabout half their authorized strength.By the time they arrived at Staten Island in late September 1762, 506 haddied, the rest so ill that they completely overwhelmed the armys hospitalfacilities. Amherst claimed, with only slight exaggeration, that there arenot twenty men to be collected from the whole t for active service.45

Years of hard campaigning, battle casualties, sickness, and desertion hadtaken their toll. Recruiting never managed to keep pace with attrition, andAmhersts forces were chronically below strength by as much as 20 to 25percent. This led the government to reduce the size of the entire armyto levels that could be more realistically maintained. Thus by mid-1761,responding to orders from Whitehall, Amherst informed his subordinatesthat hereafter regiments would be reduced from 1,000 men each to 700.Two years later, in a further effort to cut costs, the army was once againreduced, down to 500 men per regimenthalf their wartime levels.46

Adding to these pressures on manpower was a liberal wartime recruitingpolicy that allowed men to enter the ranks for three years or the duration ofthe war instead of through open-ended life enlistments. In a bid to main-tain the manpower required for occupation duties in Canada and the West,Amherst decided to hold redcoats beyond their enlistments. This provedhighly unpopular with enlisted men, who openly objected to this violation ofcontractual obligations. By 1762, especially in new regiments like the RoyalAmericans, growing numbers of men were demanding discharges. Desper-ate ofcers in the West received Insolent Lettersthinly veiled threatsby soldiers fed up with vague promises that they would be released. Otherredcoats simply voted with their feet. Commanders feared mass desertionsthat would further diminish already dwindling numbers of soldiers.47

Even as it was moving into the West, then, the army was in the midstof coping with the unsettling transition from war to peace. Its strength wasbeing substantially reduced even as its American commitments grew larger.

The battalion of the Royal Americans, on which the burdens of frontier



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Lines: 213 to 219


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duty fell, was some 233 men20 percentbelow strength in mid-1760.Some 400 of the fewer than 800 men remaining had been sent to FortNiagara that summer. Of those who remained in the Ohio Country, Rogerstook 100 with him to Detroit at the end of the year. Moreover, many enlistedmen were taken from garrison duty by the constant need to keep bateauxmoving along lakes and rivers. Ordered to detach men from Detroit tooutpost duty, Captain Campbell objected, arguing that his small garrisonwas fully occupied and that it was impossible to take possession of theseposts at present. Instead, half the Niagara garrison was eventually sent outwith Gladwin and later to complete the occupation.48

By early spring 1763, the northern portion of Britains new frontier hadreached its greatest extent. From Fort Bedford on Forbess Road to FortEdward Augustus at La Baye, some 750 men in ten companies of the RoyalAmericans were divided among fourteen posts; garrisons ranged in sizefrom the 193 men at Fort Pitt to Ens. James Gorrell and his seventeen menat Edward Augustus. Though augmented by small numbers of other troops,including men from the Royal Artillery, this western force was hard-pressedto impose imperial authority over so large a region. Sir William Johnson wasonly one of those who recognized the vulnerability of such a force and whoquestioned the usefulness of forts that may prove a means of retarding theprogress of an Army but that could in no way prevent the Invasion of theIndians, who could easily ignore such defenses. Others, like the soldierscommander, Henry Bouquet, worried more about the corrosive effects offrontier service on a regiment that was divided and scattered throughoutour immense conquests, especially when he reected on the fact that histroops had seen six years of hard service in America and [have] not beentogether from the beginning of 1757.49

By late autumn 1763, British troops were beginning to come ashore onthe Gulf of Mexico to occupy West Florida. Wasted by malaria and yellowfever from service in Cuba, the remnants of three regimentslittle morethan 600 men t for dutytook up their new posts on the gulf: the 22nd and34th Foot to Mobile and its outposts, the 35th to Pensacola. Within weeksof their arrival, detachments had been sent out to Fort Tombecbe, renamedFort York, on the Tombigbee River in the heart of the Choctaws countryand to the Iberville River. Like their comrades to the north, Maj. RobertFarmars redcoats on the gulf found themselves quite alonemost of theFrench and Spanish settlers had departedand living within a world stillcontrolled by Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws whose warriors numberedin the thousands.50



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Lines: 219 to 225


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While redcoats were extending their hold over West Florida, coalitionsof natives in the Ohio Country and Great Lakes were systematically wreck-ing the northern ank of the armed frontier. Beginning in May 1763,the vulnerability of small, widely separated outposts was driven home asSenecas, Ottawas, and others destroyed, captured, or forced the evacuationof all the garrisons save Detroit, Forts Niagara and Pitt, and two outpostsalong Forbess Road. The lesson was clear to the armys new commander inchief, Gen. Sir Thomas Gage. With the return of an uneasy peace in 1765,only Fort Michilimackinac, recognized for its strategic value as the placeof deposit and point of departure in the upper lakes, was reoccupied, whilenew construction of western forts came to a halt. The end of hostilitiescoincided with a new phase in the armys western adventure, one character-ized by retrenchment as shifts in imperial policy, straitened budgets, andgrowing unrest in the seaboard colonies put limits onand in some casesendedthe troops mission on the frontier.51

Rejecting Amhersts determination to recover all the posts lost in theIndian war of 1763, Gage took a more realistic approach to western de-fense. Recognizing that troop reductions would occasion some Distresson his already limited forces, Gage acknowledged that the Multiplicityof Forts . . . already occupied will not admit of any Increase. Accepting,too, that the government seemed much tired of the Expense of SupportingForts and not convinced that his army could continue to regulate trade andIndian affairs, Gage began to consolidate his western forces, reducing gar-risons to the minimum necessary to maintain a respectable presence amongthe Indians while keeping control of important inland passages such as theNiagara portage and the Forks of the Ohio.52

Policy decisions in London made it easier for Gage to pursue his goalof withdrawing as many troops as possible from exposed frontier garrisons.Plans to use the army to regulate Indian trade were abandoned after 1768and with that went the justication for keeping troops beyond the Ap-palachians.53

Retrenchment took place on several levels. First, small outposts no long-er useful were abandoned or turned over to civilian caretakers. By mid-April1766 Forts Ligonier and Bedford had been evacuated, leaving Fort Pitt theonly remaining post in the Ohio Country. By the end of 1772 it wouldalso be abandoned, its value as a guardian of the Ohio River gone whenthe decision was made to withdraw troops from the Illinois Country thatsame year. To the south, Gage likewise ordered the vulnerable outposts atTombecbe, Natchez, and Fort Bute abandoned and troops concentrated at



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Lines: 225 to 239


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Mobile and Pensacola. Operation of the Niagara portage was turned overto a civilian partnership of John Stedman and Francis Pster, the latter ahalf-pay ofcer and acting engineer at Fort Niagara. Finally, the re

army and empire british soldiers on the american frontier 1758 1775

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