George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

[120]

The dead were scalped by the Indians, and the

chap. V.} 1754.

chieftain, Monacawache, bore a scalp and a hatchet to each of the tribes of the Miamis, inviting their great war-chiefs and braves to go hand in hand with the Six Nations and the English.

While Washington was looking wistfully for aid from the banks of the Muskingum, the Miami, and the Wabash, from Maryland and Pennsylvania, and from all the six provinces to which appeals had been made, no relief arrived. An independent company came, indeed, from South Carolina; but its captain, proud of his commission from the king, weakened the little army by wrangling for precedence over the provincial commander of the Virginia regiment; and it is the sober judgment of the well-informed,¹ that, if Washington had remained undisputed chief, the defeat that followed would have been avoided. While he, with his Virginians, constructed a road for about thirteen miles through the gorge in the mountains to Gist's settlement, and a party was clearing a path as far as the mouth of the Redstone, the Half-King saw with anger that the independent company remained in idleness at Great Meadows ‘from one full moon to the other;’² and, foreboding evil, he removed his wife and children to a place of safety. The numbers of the French were constantly increasing. Washington, whom so many colonies had been vainly solicited to succor, was, on the first day of July, compelled to fall back upon Fort Necessity, the rude stockade at Great Meadows. The royal troops had done nothing to make it tenable. The little intrenchment was in a glade between two eminences