Fort Bedford
Pennsylvania
Fort Bedford was built in the summer of seventeen fifty-eight by Colonel Henry Bouquet under orders from General John Forbes. The star-shaped log fortress served as the grand central depot of the Forbes campaign, the massive British push to seize Fort Duquesne from the French. Up to eight hundred soldiers staged here, and Forbes and Bouquet used it as their headquarters.
When the French abandoned and burned Fort Duquesne that November, the western frontier opened for British settlement. Fort Bedford's story did not end there: in seventeen sixty-nine, according to the frontiersman James Smith's own account, a band of frontier colonists seized it from its small British garrison, a claim no other source confirms.
