He knew little of forest warfare with its use of
Indian scouts, its ambushes, its fighting from the cover of
trees. On the 9th of July, on the Monongahela River, near Fort
Duquesne, in a struggle in the forest against French and Indians
he was defeated and killed. George Washington was in the fight
and had to report to Dinwiddie the dismal record of what had
happened. The frontier was aflame; and nearly all the Indians of
the West, seeing the rising star, went over to the French. The
power of France was, for the time, supreme in the heart of the
continent. At that moment even far away in the lone land about
the Saskatchewan, the English trader, Hendry, had to admit that
the French knew better than the English how to attract the
support of the savage tribes.
Meanwhile Dieskau had arrived at Quebec. In the colony of New
York Sir William Johnson, the rough and cheery Irishman, much
loved of the Iroquois, was gathering forces to attack Canada.
Early in July, 1755, Johnson had more than three thousand
provincial troops at Albany, a motley horde of embattled farmers,
most of them with no uniforms, dressed in their own homespun,
carrying their own muskets, electing their own officers, and
altogether, from the strict soldier's point of view, a rabble
rather than an army.
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