“When it was discovered the chaplain was too badly wounded to come forward, Colonel Washington led a brief and apparently moving funeral service. Morgan and your father, despite his wounded shoulder, were among the men who interred the British Commanding General in an ignominious, unmarked grave in the middle of the road through the wilderness.

“All told, Braddock’s expedition lost more than 570 missing, killed in action, or died of wounds. Another 422 were wounded and survived. Of the eighty-six commissioned British and Colonial officers who headed off to the Monongahela, twenty-six were killed and thirty-seven were wounded and lived, your father among them.

“Omitted from the official reports submitted to the government in London is any mention of the fifty-six women who accompanied their husbands on the expedition into the wilderness. Only four, all injured, survived. The women who perished suffered the cruelest deaths of all. After being repeatedly violated by the savages, they were scalped alive, disemboweled, and finally beheaded.”

I was sickened by his description and asked, “If the women weren’t mentioned in the official reports, how do you know what happened to them?”

“Good question, Nathanael. I learned about the women last year when several members of our Committee of Safety met with a secret emissary sent to Virginia by Count Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister. We met for two days in Alexandria. In our conversations he told us the horrible fate of the women in Braddock’s column.

“He also informed us that in the fight along the Monongahela, the French and Canadian troops lost only eight soldiers—including their commander, Daniel Liénard de Beaujeu. Their Indian allies had just fifteen killed and twelve wounded. He claimed some of the French officers shot several of the savages in an effort to stop them from torturing the women.

“The sad caravan, led by Washington and once again headed by Morgan’s wagon, arrived back at Fort Cumberland on the 17th of July, 1755. A few days later your father and Daniel returned to Winchester. When all this happened, your father was twenty-seven, Washington was just twenty-three years old, and Morgan was but nineteen.”

I was totally taken by the story. When Rev. Thruston stopped talking, I shook my head, astounded by what he told me about my father and his comrades, at what happened when they were so young and said, “And now, my father is forty-seven, Washington is forty-three, and Morgan is thirty-eight?”

“Ahh,” the pastor said with a smile, “you can do your numbers. Would you like to know more about the man you’re about to meet?” th

Endnotes

1. Fort Duquesne, erected by French troops dispatched from Canada in 1754 is the site of present-day Pittsburgh, PA.

2. “Bloody Flux” and “Colic”: terms used in the 1700s to describe what we now call dysentery.

Chapter Four: Planting the Seeds of War

CHAPTER FOUR

PLANTING THE SEEDS OF WAR

Allason’s Shenandoah Store

Winchester, Virginia

Monday, April 24th, 1775