Braddock's Road: The March That Ended in Disaster

Near here, in June of seventeen fifty-five, General Edward Braddock made camp on a doomed march. He was leading roughly two thousand British regulars and colonial militia toward Fort Duquesne, the French stronghold at the forks of the Ohio, what is now Pittsburgh.

The camp near this spot sat beside a great rock named for Tanacharisson, an Iroquois leader the British called the Half King, who served as a diplomatic broker between the Crown and the Ohio Valley nations. George Washington had worked with Tanacharisson in seventeen fifty-four during an earlier, smaller expedition. Braddock pressed on despite warnings. On July ninth his column was ambushed on the Monongahela, Braddock was mortally wounded, and nearly nine hundred of his men were killed or wounded. The road he cut through these mountains is followed in part by what is now U.S. Route Forty.