A fellow-countryman of Forbes has built beside Forbes's Road (now Forbes Street), in the city of Pittsburg, a magnificent library. What could be more fitting or beautiful than that this brave Scotchman's memory should be honored with a monumental pillar here on his road which "opened the Great West to English enterprise?" And let it bear the sweet human testimony of a British historian: "No general was ever more beloved by the men under his command."[76] CHAPTER VI THE MILITARY ROAD TO THE WEST There is another hero of Forbes's Road. The rough days of that summer of 1758 were only suggestions of what was to come. Other armies than that of Forbes were to pass this way, for, be it understood at once, Forbes's Road became the great military highway into the West. No single road in America witnessed so many campaigns; no road in America was fortified by such a chain of forts. For a generation this route from Lancaster by Carlisle, Bedford, Ligonier to Pittsburg was the most important thoroughfare to the West. The French retired from Fort Duquesne, down the Ohio and up the Allegheny. The remainder of the war was fought far away on the St. Lawrence. Hardly a shot was fired in the West after the skirmishes at Fort Ligonier succeeding Grant's defeat. The French at Venango and Detroit made light of Forbes's occupation of Fort Duquesne. They had retired voluntarily and swore to return in the spring. In a dozen western posts the French bragged still of their possession of the West and of their future conquests. The Indians believed each boast. In the next year's campaign Quebec fell. New France passed away, and all French territory east of the Mississippi, save only a fishing station on the island of Newfoundland came into the hands of the English. But this campaign was fought in the far northeast. Of it the West and its redskinned inhabitants knew nothing. Fort Niagara was the most westerly fort which had succumbed; Fort Duquesne, technically, was evacuated. The real story of the successive French defeats was, perhaps, little heard of in the West; or, if communicated to the Indian allies there, the logical conclusion was not plain to them. How could a land be conquered where not a single battle had been fought? So far as the Indians were concerned, France was never more in possession of their western lakes and forests than then. Was not the blundering Braddock killed and his fine army utterly put to rout? Were not the French forts in the West--Presque Isle, Venango, Le Boeuf, Miami, and Detroit, secure? Fort Duquesne could be reoccupied whenever the French would give the signal. The leaden plates of France still reposed at the mouths of the rivers of the West and the Arms of the King of France still rattled in the wind which swept the land.