George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

‘ [186] not at all impatient to be scalped,’ thought men in

chap. VIII.} 1755.

England. Meantime Fort Duquesne was receiving reinforcements. ‘We shall have more to do,’ said Washington, ‘than to go up the hills and come down.’

The army moved forward slowly and with military exactness, but in a slender line, nearly four miles long; always in fear of Indian ambuscades; exposed, by attacks on its flanks, to be cut in pieces like a thread. The narrow road was made with infinite toil across mountains and masses of lofty rocks, over ravines and rivers. As the horses, for want of forage, must feed on the wild grasses, and the cattle browse among the shrubs, they grew weak, and began to give out. The regular troops pined under the wilderness fare.

On the nineteenth of June, Braddock, by Washington's advice, leaving Dunbar behind with the residue of the army, resolved to push forward with twelve hundred chosen men. ‘The prospect,’ says Washington, ‘conveyed to my mind infinite delight;’ and he would not suffer ‘excessive’ illness to detain him from active service. Yet still they stopped to level every molehill, and erect bridges over every creek. On the eighth of July they arrived at the fork of the Monongahela and Youghiogeny Rivers. The distance to Fort Duquesne was but twelve miles, and the Governor of New France gave it up as lost.¹

Early in the morning of the ninth of July, Braddock set his troops in motion. A little below the