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News of Fort Duquesne’s destruction reached Philadelphia in midDecember 1758, sparking public celebrations and an outpouring of relief and joy. “Blessed be God, the long looked for day is arrived,” trumpeted the Pennsylvania Gazette, the colony’s leading newspaper. After nearly four years, Pennsylvanians rejoiced that the French hold on the Ohio forks had been broken, at last allowing for “the quiet and peaceable possession of the finest and most fertile country of America.” But such pronouncements masked an important development: Fort Duquesne had been captured by the British Army, not by Pennsylvania or Virginia.The army that occupied the forks amid the ruins of Fort Duquesne was an agent of the British Empire, and for most of the next fifteen years the army was the only legitimate authority in the region. Army officers, along with their superiors in London, attempted to exercise authority over the region and control access to its latent economic potential, significantly altering how the struggle for the Ohio forks was waged. Yet the army’s efforts to impose its authority over the western Pennsylvania frontier was hampered by severe limitations in operational power and plagued by sustained competition from Pennsylvania and Virginia. Even more troubling were the increasing numbers of immigrants who arrived after 1758. The army lacked a clear plan for dealing with the newcomers, resulting in an uneven application of policy that further comprised military authority in the region. As events unfolded, it became clear that the British and their colonists had very different expectations for the future development of the region.1 During the winter of 1758–59, the most immediate problem facing the British Army was maintaining its slippery grasp on the Ohio forks. The· 81 · Four Quiet and Peaceable Possession? 82 a colony sprung from hell French had been dislodged from Fort Duquesne but still held several smaller forts to the north along the Allegheny River.With the Seven Years’ War still raging in full force throughout New York and along the Canadian border, there could be no guarantee that the French would not return to contest possession of the forks. Perhaps even more troubling, Forbes’s army sat isolated in territory claimed by the upper Ohio Indians, powerful adversaries who had not been defeated in war.The negotiated settlement that brokered their withdrawal from the war was tenuous, and they too could chose to reassert themselves militarily at any time.Further complicating the situation was the remoteness of the western Pennsylvania frontier. Supplies and reinforcements would be hard-pressed to reach the Ohio forks before spring, making the British occupation all the more difficult. Recognizing that his army was vulnerable and conceding that it would be impossible to sustain his troops through the winter, Forbes chose to march most of the army back to Philadelphia, where he could personally oversee the supply situation and coordinate future moves with his superiors. But he would get the opportunity to do neither,because during the return march the often-ill general grappled with “the sharpest and most severe of all distempers.” By early March 1759 he was dead.2 Command now fell to Colonel Henry Bouquet, who recognized that British military control of the Ohio forks, renamed Pittsburgh by Forbes in late 1758 to honor British prime minister William Pitt, was extremely tenuous . With the departure of the main army and the expiration of provincial enlistments, Bouquet had only 200 weary and poorly supplied troops under his command—a number that would likely prove insufficient if the French launched a counteroffensive or if the uneasy truce with the upper Ohio Indians unraveled.The Indians were the more immediate problem. In early December 1758, a delegation of Delawares under Tamaqua arrived at the Ohio forks to assess the intentions of the British troops there. While reaffirming the Easton treaty peace accords and exchanging customary gifts of goodwill, Tamaqua told Bouquet that the Indians expected the British Army to “go back over the mountains.” But George Croghan, who had recently been appointed a deputy Indian agent and assigned to Pittsburgh,instructed Andrew Montour,his interpreter,not to conveyTamaqua’s message to Bouquet. Croghan’s official position required him to work in close cooperation with army officers at Pittsburgh, but even in his new appointment he displayed a flexibility of self-interest perhaps greater than anyone else connected to the region. He knew that the disruption of the Indians’ seasonal hunting and planting during the war had reduced some native communities to the brink...

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