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| Title | The Allegheny Pilot
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| Full Text | 58 military hats of the officers and soldiers. Behind all came a train of baggage horses, ladened with piles of scalps, canteens, and all the accoutrements of British soldiers. The savages appeared frantic with joy, and when Smith beheld them entering the Fort, dancing, yelling, brandishing, their red tomahawks, and waving their scalps in the air, while the great guns of the Fort replied to the incessant discharge of rifles without, he said that it looked as if h__1 had given a holiday, and turned loose its inhabitans upon the upper world. The melencholy spectacle was the band of prisoners. They appeared dejected and anxious. Poor fellows! They had but a few months before left London, at the command of their superiors, and we may easily immagine their feelings at the strange and dreadful spectacle around them. The yells of delight and congratulation were scarcely over, when those of vengeance began. The devoted prisoners (British regulars, ) were led out from the Fort to the banks of the Allegheny, and to the eternal disgrace of the French commandant, were there burnt to death, with the most awful tortures. Smith stood upon the battlements, and witnessed the shocking spectacle. The prisoner was tied to a stake, with'his hands raisen above his head, stripped naked, and surrounded by Indians. They would touch him with red hot Irons, and stick his body full of pine splinters, and set them on fire—drowning the shrieks of the victim in the yells of delight with which they danced around him. His companions in the mean time stood in a group near the stake, and had a foretaste of what was in reserve for each of them. As fast as one prisoner died Under his tortures, another filled his place, until the whole perished. All this, took place so near the Fort, that every scream of the victims must have rang in the ears of the French commandant! Gen. Braddock was a brave man, and had enjoyed much experiance in military life; but he was naturally haughty, imperious, and self-complacent disdaining to receive council from his subordination, and, what was less excusable in a general, despiseing his enemy. These peculiarities of his personal character were undoubtedly the cause of losing his army, and his own life. While on his march, Col. Croghan, from Pennsylvania, a distinguished frontier-man, with a hundred Indians, offered his services to aid the expedition by scouring the forest in advance of the army and bringing intelligence of the enemy's movements. Washington, with his peculiar modesty and courtesy, advised him to accept their aid; his advice was apparently listened to: but the Indians were treated so coolly that they withdrew in disgust c. Braddock not only despised Indians, but all Indian modes of fighting; denouncing the habit of the provincial troops of flighting Indians from behind trees and insisting upon their coming out upon the open field, ''like Englishmen." The provincal troops were no dastards; and could they with their favorite champion, have had their own way that fatal day would have been changed. After Braddock fell, the retreating soldiers carried their wounded general for four days until they reached seven miles beyond Dunbar's Camp, where he expired. He was buried in the center of the road which his advancing army had cut; and to prevent the discovry of the grave, and to save the body from savage dishonor, soldiers, horses and wagons were passed over it. Some of the soldiers so marked the trees near the spot, that those who visited the west many years after could point it out with certainty. It is near a small run, a few rods north of the national road, between the 53d and 54th mile from Cumberland, and a little west of the Braddock's run tavern, kept by Mr. R. Shaw. The present national road deviates from Braddock's road near Mr. Shaw's, and crosses Laurel hill by a more southerly route. Before this was located, the old road was the great thoroughfare between the Monongahela settlements and Baltimore. Some twenty years hence, while a party of laborers were repairing the old road, and digging away the slope of the hill, they disinterred some bones, with sundry military trappings, which were at once known by the old settlers to be those of Braddock. One and another took several of the most promonent bones and the others were reinterred under the tree on the hill, near the national road. Mr. Stewart of Uniontown, (father of the Hon. Andrew Stewart, ) afterwards collected the scattered bones from the indviduals who had taken them, and sent them, it is believed, to Peale's museum in Philadelphia. A plain shingle, marked 'Braddock's Grave' nailed to the tree where a part of the bones a reinterred, is the only monument to point out to the traveler the resting-place of the proud and brave but unfortunate Braddock. Thus we see the'truthfulness of the proverb verified, that, "pride goeth before distraution, and a haughty spirit before a fall." There had long exisied a traddition in the reigon that Braddock was killed by one of his own men, and more recent developments leave little or no doubt of the fact. A recent writer in the National Intelligencer, whose authority is good on such points, says: "When my father was removing with his family to the west, one of the Fausetts kept a public house to the eastward from, and near where Uniontown now stands, as the county seat of Fayette, Pa. This man's house we lodged in about the 10th of October, 1781, twenty six years and a few months after Braddock's defeat, and there it was made anything but a secret, that one of the family dealt the death blow to the British general. Thirteen years afterwards I met Thomas Fausett in Fayette Co., then as he told me |
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