Note 80 — Front matter

G. E. F. Gray, chief clerk of the Edgar Thomson Steel Works at Braddock, Pa., wrote to me under date of December 9, 1908, that their chief engineer, Sydney Dillon, had already done some preliminary work toward locating the original banks of Turtle Creek and of the Monongahela River, and toward fixing the place of Frazer’s Cabin and of the road through Braddock. The steel works are located on a part of the battlefield, along the river.

On February 11, 1909, Mr. Dillon communicated to me the results of his labors based on a study of the ground in connection with the two maps made by Patrick Mackellar, Braddock’s chief engineer (Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, 1905, I. op. 214-215), supplemented by the plan in Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History of America, V. 449, and by the Carnegie McCandless Company’s property map of 1873. This is by far the most able and careful study of the battlefield that has been made in modern times. Mr. Dillon’s plans enable one to follow the course of the road through the battlefield, and to form an idea of the action with a distinctness that has not been possible heretofore. In order to comprehend the nature of the fight, however, and to understand the conditions that made Braddock’s defeat almost inevitable, one must see the field for himself.