It was at once decided that Fort Pitt on the Ohio, guarding as it did the Western frontier of the Colonies, must be saved at any cost, but owing to the reduction of the Army in America after the great war, it was with the utmost difficulty that, at Carlisle, 150 miles west of Philadelphia, a small column was formed under Bouquet, consisting of barely 500 men of the 1st Battalion 60th Royal Americans and the 42nd Highlanders. This courageous band, led by the stout-hearted and experienced Henry Bouquet, marched almost as a forlorn hope to the relief of the garrison. Reaching, after a long and weary march, the dangerous defiles of Bushey Run, ten miles only from their objective and within view of the scene of Braddock’s crushing defeat, a site of battle deliberately chosen by their cunning foe, the little force was suddenly attacked by a vastly superior number of Indian braves. During two long trying days the combatants fought a desperate battle, until at last Bouquet’s genius as a leader achieved a brilliant victory. This victory, pronounced by an American historian “the best contested action ever fought between white men and Indians,” was followed up in the coming year by a vigorous advance by Bradstreet upon Detroit by way of Lake Erie; and by Bouquet marching from Fort Pitt with a column consisting of his own Battalion of the 60th, the 42nd, and Provincial troops, which he led into the very heart of the enemy’s country. Bouquet’s column was triumphant, and upon reaching the Indian settlements on the River Muskingum, deep in the wild fastnesses of the primeval forest, their leader’s diplomatic skill and defiant attitude completed the successful issue of the campaign. Bouquet thus rightly earned for himself and his men the credit of having finally broken the French influence and Red Indian power in the West, giving to the British Crown all the vast territories west of the Alleghany Mountains and south of the Great Lakes, comprising now the States of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Western Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. The conspicuous part played at this period by the 60th Royal Americans, and the exceptional merit of many of its officers have hitherto been better understood in the United States and in Canada than by our own countrymen. But it is now at last acknowledged that the Regiment, owing to its especial attributes, was in the forefront of all those operations which (more than any others) added a peculiar lustre to the British Crown at this early stage of the evolution of the British Empire in North America. There is no period in the Regimental history of which The King’s Royal Rifle Corps may more justly be proud than the epoch from its birth in 1755 to the final overthrow of the French and Red-Indian power in 1764. [Sidenote: 1762, MARTINIQUE.] [Sidenote: Aug. 13th, 1762, HAVANNAH.]