Braddock's March: The Camp Before the Disaster

Near here, in late June of seventeen fifty-five, General Edward Braddock made camp on the long march toward Fort Duquesne. His army of roughly thirteen hundred British regulars and colonial militia had been pushing through the Pennsylvania wilderness for weeks, hacking a road as they went. Soon after, the army forded the Youghiogheny River at Stewart's Crossing, a point about half a mile northwest of what is now Connellsville.

They were roughly two weeks from catastrophe. On July ninth, a French and Native American force ambushed the column on the banks of the Monongahela. Braddock's troops, trained for European open-field warfare, panicked in the forested ambush.

Braddock himself was mortally wounded. Of the roughly thirteen hundred men who crossed the Monongahela that morning, nearly nine hundred were killed or wounded. A young George Washington, serving as an aide, had bullets through his coat when the day was done.