Father: Rumors Unmanaged, 1757

The following is an excerpt from chapter five of Gregory Dowd's latest book, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Check back with us every Thursday in the month of November for more Groundless excerpts highlighting word-of-mouth tales from Early America.

The young colonel, wary of false alarms, heard the ring of truth in the reports. Some two thousand enemy French and Indians had rendezvoused at Fort Duquesne on the Ohio River, and they now marched his way. The powerful expedition had already crossed the Monongahela River, passing the site of General Edward Braddock’s infamous 1755 defeat, which the colonel remembered all too well. A veteran of that disaster, he could imagine French men and horses straining at heavy artillery as they lumbered, flanked by Indians, across the many, parallel, forbidding ridges of the Alleghenies. Such a force would make quick work of Fort Cumberland, a weak outpost on the Maryland frontier. All signs indicated that the enemy thousands would next hit his own station, Fort Loudoun at Winchester, Virginia. The enemy, wrote the colonel, “are bringing howitzers with them for the easier reduction of the place.” The cunning foe, advancing in thousands, threatened destruction to the unfathomably, unconscionably, weak colonies. Looking on his current “intelligence” as “of utmost importance,” the young George Washington forwarded copies to the governor, and he called a council of war.

He had precise details. A party of six British- allied Cherokees had gone toward French Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh), along with fourteen other Indians and ten colonials under the Virginia Regiment’s Captain Robert Spotswood. The six Cherokee men had boldly spied ahead toward Duquesne, the bustling regional hub of enemy military operations. In extreme danger, the stealthy six saw the enemy preparing the carriage of mortars so large, as they were later said to have put it, that a fawn could sleep in each weapon’s gaping mouth. Before returning to their outpost, Fort Cumberland, they came under attack. Three took bullets, but all lived to breathe the bad news to British forces.

Washington understood that the six had returned directly to Cumberland, which meant that Spotswood and the others still patrolled the high country; if so, he feared that “they are all cut off ” by the enemy’s thousands. He carefully examined the intelligence at his disposal, appealed for assistance, and took action. His foes would crush Fort Cumberland, but he might defend Fort Loudoun at Winchester with the help of neighboring counties. He sounded the alarm to the county militia lieutenants at Fairfax, Prince William, and Culpeper, adding that “the truth of the report is, I believe, unquestionable.”

“I believe,” he said, taking faith in the reports. But faith often admits doubt, and young Washington left that door ajar with the word “if.” “If the enemy are coming down,” he wrote, and, notably, “if the Indian intelligence may be relied on.” A responsible officer, Washington informed his superiors of contradictory evidence: a French prisoner taken by a different Cherokee party near Duquesne weeks earlier had insisted, under interrogation, that Fort Duquesne possessed no heavy artillery capable of carriage across the Allegheny Mountains. Washington knew the enemy would not attack if the prisoner’s “intelligence is to be literally credited,” but, he believed, “surely it is not.” 

Putting doubt aside, Washington instructed Major Andrew Lewis on the South Branch to “give all the country people warning of the danger with which they were threatened,” a danger he likely increased. He had little information, and he made what historian Matthew Ward has aptly characterized as “a terrible decision,” ordering the consolidation of forces and the abandonment of several frontier outposts, stimulating a further evacuation of the outlying settlements. From the Alleghenies eastward to the Blue Ridge, terror swept the valleys of Virginia.

The situation in 1757 demanded fear, but not because an enemy force of thousands came howling with great guns to level Virginia’s fortifications. For one thing, Indian raiders had for two years terrorized and devastated the Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania backcountry. For another, in the colonel’s news lay a kernel of truth: a French and intertribal party led by Lieutenant Pierre-Louis Boucher de Ninerville, sieur de Montizambert, had actually sallied out from Fort Duquesne with designs on Fort Cumberland; the force had even crested the Appalachians. The Cherokee reports anticipating this were, in that sense, pinpoint accurate even as they reached Washington in Winchester. But, just as the French prisoner had insisted, the invading force had no artillery. What is more (or less), the entire invading force had only two hundred— not two thousand— men. It had no design on Winchester. As it happened, Montizambert fell seriously ill before reaching Cumberland; he and the French gunmen returned to Duquesne. Their allies, in scores, not thousands, broke up into smaller parties, which brought devastation to scattered settlements on the South Branch of the Potomac. Fort Cumberland saw no assault; Loudoun had never been in danger. But the phantom force wreaked havoc, as backcountry settlers saw local garrisons withdrawn to protect forts against it and as smaller forces stepped up their raids on farmsteads. A genuinely dangerous place, Virginia’s war time frontier amplified news and rumor. There uncertainty flourished; there people needed more accurate information than they had; there they needed “to ‘make sense’ of events which otherwise would seem merely accidental or calamitous.” Washington’s frontier vainly cried out for intelligence.

Two hundred armed and dangerous men marched out of Fort Duquesne. From the house of rumor screamed their unreal allies by the thousands. Phantom French soldiers drove nonexistent draft animals that dragged weightless howitzers over the broad ranges of the Alleghenies, and phantom Shawnees, Ottawas, and Delawares protected the army’s flanks. Unreal French-Indian plots threatened Washington’s own post. Real and increasingly routine terrors, uncertainties, and dangers accompanied these nonentities.

Gregory Evans Dowd is a professor of history and American culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815, War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire, and most recently, and, most recently, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier.