This officer, who commanded the king’s troops at Philadelphia, was a
young Swiss who had fought in the great wars of Europe, in the service
of the king of Piedmont and of the Dutch republic, before he was given a
commission by the king of Great Britain. He had distinguished himself
by his bravery, his skill, and his good sense. He seems to have been the
first European commander to disuse the rules of European warfare, and
to take a lesson from our pioneers in fighting the Indians, and the year
before he set out for the Ohio country, he had beaten the tribes in a
battle that taught them to respect him. They found that they had no such
wrong-headed leader as Braddock to deal with; and that they could not
hope to ambush Bouquet’s troops, and shoot them down like cattle in a
pen; and the news of his coming spread awe among them.
He gathered his forces together at Fort Pitt, after many delays. At one
time a full third of his colonial recruits deserted him, but he waited
till he had made up their number again, and then he started at the head
of fifteen hundred men, on the 3d of October, 1764. A body of Virginians
went first in three scouting parties, one on the right and one on the
left, to beat up the woods for lurking enemies, and one in the middle
with a guide, to lead the way. Then came the pioneers with their axes,
and two companies of light infantry followed, to clear the way for the
main body of the troops. A column of British regulars, two deep, marched
in the center with a file of regulars on their right, and a file of
Pennsylvanian recruits on their left.
Two platoons of regulars came after these; then came a battalion of
Pennsylvanians in single file on the right and left, and between them
the convoy, with the ammunition and tools first, then the officers’
baggage and tents, then the sheep and oxen in separate droves for the
subsistence of the army, then the pack horses with other provisions.
A party of light horsemen followed, and last of all another body of
Virginians brought up the rear. The men marched in silence, six feet
from one another, ready, if any part of the force halted, to face
outward, and prepare to meet an attack.
The Indians hung upon Bouquet’s march in large numbers at first, but
when they saw the perfect order and discipline of his army, and the
knowledge of their own tactics which he showed in disposing his men,
they fell away, and he kept his course unmolested, so that in two weeks
he reached a point in the Ohio country which he could now reach in two
hours, if he took rail from Pittsburg direct. But the wonder is for
what he did then, and not for what he could do now. His two weeks’ march
through the wilderness was a victory such as had never been achieved
before, and it moved the imagination of the Indians more than if he had
fought them the whole way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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