Note 146 — Chapter V
Reading edition
"New York, Dec. 13. Early on Monday last an express arrived hither from the westward, and brought sundry letters which gave an account that General Forbes was in possession of Fort du Quesne; one of those letters said: 'Fort du Quesne, Nov. 26, 1756. I have now the pleasure to write to you from the ruins of the fort.... We arrived at six o'clock last night, and found it in a great measure destroyed. There are two forts about twenty yards distant; the one built with immense labor, small, but a great deal of strong works collected into little room, and stands at the point of a narrow neck of land at the confluence of the two rivers: it is square, and has two ravelins, gabions at each corner, &c. The other fort stands on the bank of the Allegany, in the form of a parallelogram, but not near so strong as the other. They sprung a mine, which ruined one of their magazines; in the other we found sixteen barrels of ammunition, &c., and about a cart-load of scalping-knives. A boy, who had been their prisoner about two years, tells us ... that they had burned five of the prisoners they took at Major Grant's defeat, on the parade, and had delivered others to the Indians, who were tomahawked on the spot. We found numbers of dead bodies within a quarter of a mile of the fort, unburied, so many monuments of French humanity. Mr. Bates is appointed to preach a thanksgiving sermon for the remarkable superiority of his majesty's arms. We left all our tents at Loyal Hanning, and every conveniency, except a blanket and a knapsack.' Another letter mentions that 'only 2500 picked men marched from Loyal Hanning ... that 200 of our people were to be left at Fort du Quesne, now Pittsburg—100 of the oldest Virginians, the others of our oldest Pennsylvanians.... The French judged rightly in abandoning a fort, the front of whose polygon is only 150 feet, and which our shells would have destroyed in three days. We have fired some howitzer shells into the face of the work, which is made of nine-inch plank, and rammed between with earth, and found that, in firing but a few hours, we must have destroyed the entire face."—The Public Advertiser, Jan. 20, 1757.