The Wilderness at the End of the World

Map of British North America, 1755, Commissioned by British Lords of Trade

When the Seven Years War in North America began in 1755 with General William Braddock’s arrival in Virginia that spring, the colonies occupied only a silver of settlements hugging the ocean. The map above shows the British view of their possessions at the start of the Seven Years War. The straight lines and clear demarcation with different colors between the colonies was a political and geographic fantasy. In reality 95% of the colonists lived to the East (to the right) of the black line. The British controlled very little of North America that did not hug the coastline. Although some of the limitation of colonial movement west was in part due to the difficulty of geography, the power of Native American tribes was the real factor. As documented by Alan Taylor and recently by Pekka Hamalainen in Indigenous Continent, native empires halted colonial settlement.

This territorial and cultural divide limited what colonists and the British leadership understood about the geography to their West. For example, in 1758, Governor William Denny of Philadelphia sent Frederick Post to meet with Teedyuscung, a Lenape Chief, to ascertain the possibility of establishing an alliance with the tribe. Although less than 80 miles from Philadelphia, Post describes the journey almost as if he is exploring another planet. His companions on the trip lamented the difficulties and expressed concern about the dangers they faced. As they pushed north of Bethlehem, Post met a Lt. Patterson who “painted the danger of our undertaking in very frightful colors.” He also received intelligence from some local warriors that war would be over soon “For there are but few, whom the devil rides.” At the point the war had three more years of tough campaigning ahead.

The frightful colors Lt. Patterson spoke of where the vast unknown regions of the map. Although a small snippet of the large war, Post’s diary illustrates how ill-informed the colonial government was of the regions more than a day’s ride into the wilderness. Although drawn on maps back in Europe as belonging to the British, the old Northwest was owned by the Indigenous tribes.

This cultural barrier between the colonists and the territory abutting their settlements created a critical gap of knowledge for the British campaign that made moving and sustaining their forces all the more difficult. Even though Post’s journey was three years after Braddock’s loss, the British still lacked the critical information as to who their native allies were (and were not), and thus how to move and protect their own lines of communication.

For Braddock’s march this lack of information led to a slow and arduous effort to carve a 200 mile by 12-foot road from Maryland to the French position at Fort Duquesne (modern-day Pittsburgh). Due to the difficulty, Braddock split his columns, faster combat troops leaving a larger supply train behind, to speed his army. Although this plan worked, and Braddock arrived near the Monongahela with his troops mostly fed and disease free, his inability to understand the topography and harness native alliances left a glaring gap in his security. As a result, his large column of wagons and soldiers were an easy mark for the French and their native allies at the Monongahela. And to make matters worse, the humiliating loss allowed the French to translate the logistics that Braddock lost into diplomatic favor and military power from native tribes. French-aligned native warriors attacked the colonial frontiers and pushed them further to the ocean, torching homesteads within 20 miles of Philadelphia.

In a cruel twist of fate, lack of cultural understanding hampered British intelligence, which in turn left them venerable to attack on their own logistics. The French then turned that same logistics back into diplomatic and military power to halt British advances and keep the threat of raided supply lines for the remainder of the war. As Post’s journal shows, even three years after Braddock’s defeat, the British still suffered from a dearth of understanding about the peoples and territories at the edge of their maps. In 1758, without intelligence and with a large gap of understanding between native tribes, colonists, and the Crown, the British chose a path of brute force. Substituting money, soldiers, forts, and supplies for allies.