In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

12 3 Braddock’s Defeat How Not to Fight Indians In July 1755, when Boone was twenty, he saw his first largescale military combat—not as a soldier but as a teamster. Boone drove wagons for the army of British regulars and American militia under the British general Edward Braddock that ended up being cut to pieces by French soldiers and their Indian allies at the Battle on the Monongahela—more commonly and less nobly known as Braddock’s Defeat. In this minor supporting role Boone, for the first time, was engaged in the fight for control of North America. Braddock’s Defeat was one of a series of British setbacks that marked the start of the French and Indian War—the North American aspect of the worldwide war between France and Britain, officially declared in 1756, that became known as the Seven Years’ War. Despite its bloody beginning for the British, the war was to result in France ceding to Britain its control of Canada and its claims to America east of the Mississippi. At the start of the 1750s three powerful groups had their eyes on the rich lands of the Ohio Valley—the British and the British colonists in America, the French and the French colonists in Canada, and the Indians living in the Ohio Valley. The British claimed them as part of their Atlantic colonies. The western boundary of Virginia, under its royal charter of 1609, extended at least as far as the Wabash River and, under an expansive reading, as far as the Pacific. Pennsylvania’s western boundary was ill defined, and in the late 1740s and early 1750s Pennsylvanians were extending the reach of their fur and skins trade with the Indians as far west as the Wabash River.1 The British interests in the Ohio Valley were not unitary: Virginia and Pennsylvania had conflicting claims to land there; traders from each colony wanted as much of the fur trade as possible; and Britain itself claimed ownership, in light of its 13 Braddock’s Defeat purported paternal relationship with the Iroquois, whose claim was based on their earlier conquests of other Indian tribes in the area.2 The French, who had been jockeying with the British for control of North America since the seventeenth century, laid claim to the Ohio Valley, based on the explorations of René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, in the late seventeenth century and those of later explorers such as Pierre-Joseph Céloron de Blainville, who asserted France’s claim to the valley in a series of metal plates that he left in his travels up and down the river in 1749.3 The French wanted the fur trade in the Ohio Valley and feared that British westward expansion could sever trade between French Canada and French Louisiana. The Indians in the Ohio Valley—including the Shawnees, Mingos, Miamis , Delawares, and Cherokees—believed they should continue to be able to farm and hunt there. In particular, the Shawnees and the Delawares, having been driven within the past few decades by the pressure of British settlement first into western Pennsylvania and then into Ohio, were deeply wary of British intentions to occupy their land in the Ohio Valley.4 In western Pennsylvania the Shawnees and the Delawares had seen the flood of British settlers—“where one of those People settled, like pigeons, a thousand more would Settle”—and, after moving to the Ohio Valley, had seen the British give land there “to a parcel of Covetous Gentlemen of Virginia called the Ohio Company” who “offered to Build Forts among us, no doubt, to make themselves Master of our Lands and make Slaves of us.”5 Delaware leaders, talking to the British, pointedly “desired to know where the Indians’ Land lay, for that the French claimed all the Land on one Side the River Ohio and the English the other Side.”6 Other Ohio Valley Indians expressed the fear that “ye Virginians and ye French Intend to Divide the Land of Ohio between them.”7 The clashing claims moved from theoretical to actual confrontation in the 1750s, as the French and the British vied for control of the lucrative fur trade with the Indians of the Ohio Valley and as British colonists kept moving west, driven by the desire for cheap land (as the Boone family had been in its move to western North Carolina). Between 1745 and 1754 the Council of Virginia issued land grants to more than two...

Share