Travel On a General’s Trail, Summoning America’s History By RUSSELL SHORTO When we told friends last year that we had decided to move from Europe to the mountains of western Maryland, we got the same response (complete with italics) over and over: Why? Point taken. Our new home, while it excels in hiking trails and glorious views, is not especially great for culture, restaurants, night life or even good coffee. But we had several reasons for moving where we did. High among them was that I was about to launch into work on a book about the American Revolution. My new town, Cumberland, would place me near the center of the action, within driving distance of battlefields and libraries up and down the East Coast. Once ensconced, I figured I might as well begin research on so expansive a topic as locally as I could. I didn’t realize at first that a credible starting point was my own backyard. I don’t use the phrase entirely figuratively. Braddock Road, which begins just below our house, runs past our yard on its way westward, up and over Haystack Mountain. The road was named for Gen. Edward Braddock, who in 1755 was tasked with winning North America for the British once and for all. Braddock — an intelligent career military man, but one with no experience in North America — mounted the largest military expedition ever undertaken on American soil up to that point, an operation that would presage the American Revolution in several ways. His momentous and ultimately disastrous expedition began just down the hill from my house. What better way to start my research than by moseying down my driveway and following him? My reconstruction of Braddock’s march took place in several stages over a couple of months, mostly by car but with some stretches on foot along mountain trails. I would rely on the help of a retired engineer who has made himself into a Braddock expert. And ultimately I would immerse myself not only in Colonial history but in a little-known but vibrant patch of American wilderness. Braddock arrived in the midst of the Seven Years’ War between England and France. He was to command the American theater, in what would become known as the French and Indian War. While the English colonies lined the East Coast, the French, from their base in Canada, had claimed much of the interior. A collision point was coming into focus amid the rolling green hills of western Pennsylvania. “The Forks of the Ohio” — the spot where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers meet to form the Ohio (where Pittsburgh sits today) — was to be a fulcrum in the global struggle between two European empires. Whoever controlled the Forks controlled the Ohio, which, since it flowed west to the Mississippi, connected the east and the interior of the continent. Braddock’s mission was to chase away the French soldiers stationed at Fort Duquesne at the Forks and establish a permanent English presence that would give Britain free rein over the limitless continent. But first he had to get there. Technically his expedition began in Alexandria, Va., but the first half was a relative cakewalk on existing roads. The roads ended at Fort Cumberland, on the Potomac River in Maryland, near my house. The fort was the staging point from which Braddock would lead his army westward, carving out the very road they would traverse across 120 brutal miles to the Forks. Possibly the best spot from which to muse on the historic event that was about to unfold in the late spring of 1755 is Café Mark in downtown Cumberland. Besides being one of the few places where you can get a good cup of coffee, it has tables on the pedestrian mall of Baltimore Street. From here you can gaze at the tower of the Emmanuel Episcopal Church, which was built where the fort once stood, and let it all come back. Industrial-era downtown Cumberland intrudes on the 18th-century daydream, but the landscape helps summon the past: the forested mountains that rim the town, the wandering beds of the Potomac River and Wills Creek. The fort itself, a simple palisade of 12-foot logs, is long gone (though it’s possible to visit its tunnels by phoning the church for an appointment), but in and around it that spring massed 2,400 men: red-coated British soldiers and Colonial militiamen. Braddock’s expedition would serve as a warm-up for some colonists who went on to greater things. Benjamin Franklin supplied wagons. Daniel Boone drove one of them. Meanwhile, Braddock needed men with experience. He knew that a young officer of the Virginia militia had headed toward the Forks the year before. At 22, George Washington had been sent to warn the French away. His trip turned into a diplomatic nightmare when his troops attacked the French they were supposed to parley with. The incident was one of the sparks that touched off the war. Now, Washington, eager to remove the stain of controversy, showed up at Fort Cumberland, ready for duty. The tiny log cabin where he stayed until the army set off has been preserved, though it has been moved from its original site within the fort to a little park across the street from the church. You can’t go in, but you can peer through the window at the diorama inside. On May 30, the first 600 men, equipped with cannons, mortars and 50 wagons, set off at daybreak. They labored up the slope of Haystack Mountain, clearing trees and blasting rocks. Just beyond our backyard, the ascent was “almost a perpendicular rock,” according to an officer’s journal; three wagons, teams and all, plunged over a cliff. By the end of the first day they had gone only two miles. It was a horrendous start. Following in their footsteps today is in one sense almost embarrassingly simple. When Thomas Jefferson sanctioned construction of a national road westward in 1806, it followed the trail Braddock had blazed. The National Road, which was also called the Cumberland Road and is better known today as Route 40, is for much of the way the modern incarnation of Braddock’s road. Then again, the journey is simple only if you are content to buzz along the general course of the route. The actual road — meaning the 12-foot-wide path Braddock’s men hacked and blasted through the wilderness — has the status of myth among some historians because of its ur-American connotations but also, I think, because locating it has proved so difficult. Centuries of development and neglect have obscured things; Route 40 repeatedly crosses it, but doesn’t precisely track it. One could do Braddock’s route in a fine day trip by staying behind the wheel and using the markers placed near each of the army’s encampments. But I wanted more, so I contacted Robert Bantz, a former engineer who has made the tracking of Braddock’s road his retirement project. After 20 years of collating data from firsthand accounts, old maps, metal detectors and a GPS, of tramping through backyards, fording streams and confronting bears and rattlesnakes, he has become the undisputed expert, lauded by the state’s archaeological society and beloved of local schools. Mr. Bantz gave me immediate satisfaction by taking me to a place just up the hill from my house. We climbed a steep rise and there, as plain as day, was a wide depression in the forest floor. We followed it to a spot that, years earlier, Mr. Bantz had calculated must be the place where the wagons pitched over. Using a metal detector, he found remnants of the calamity, including a horse’s bit. Mr. Bantz says that today more than 90 percent of the existing trail is on private land or is covered by parking lots or roadway, but there are still stretches, like this one, that give some sense of what Braddock, Washington and the rest of the army must have experienced. I spent a day with him seeking out such places, and it was a thrilling experience precisely because of the convergence of historical import and hiddenness. On top of Big Savage Mountain, 25 miles from Cumberland, we traced a stretch of the road through wild and deep woods. On and on it went, running through the silent forest like a secret pulse of America’s infancy. Back on Route 40, I began my journey to the Forks by car. The road itself was a world away from the one Braddock’s men made, but for long stretches the landscape it crossed felt downright primordial. Maryland’s panhandle comprises a rolling succession of rises with forbidding or antique names: Big Savage Mountain, Breakneck Hill, Dung Hill, Snaggy Hill, Contrary Knob. It’s not a populous area. In Frostburg, west of Cumberland, Route 40 becomes Main Street. Frostburg is a college town, so offers a rare spot of civilization, including some lively restaurants and bars. (Dante’s, a hipster dive, has a good selection of beers; the Hen House, a few miles out of town, is a big barn of a restaurant with down-home cooking.) A few miles farther, the countryside feels more remote; the thickly wooded mountains are layered with misty valleys. As I reached the top of Negro Mountain, which was supposedly named for a slave who died there during the war (and yes, there have been recent attempts at renaming it), the trees went from deciduous to pine, and the view encompassed miles of seeming wilderness. Coming down the other side of the mountain, I crossed the Mason-Dixon Line into Pennsylvania, and eventually the landscape went from prehistoric to simply rustic. There were cornfields and campgrounds; the serpentine Youghiogheny River Lake (actually a 15-mile-long reservoir) was lined with pleasure boats. Here, at 4 in the morning, Indians under French command attacked, killing and scalping five men, then faded away. On the other side of Route 40, meanwhile, is surely the place to stay if your goal is to heighten the contrast with the lethal conditions Braddock’s men faced. Nemacolin Woodlands Resort is a sprawling deluxe facility — spa, golf courses, “chateau” accommodations — named after the Native American who first blazed a trail in this direction. Just past the resort is Fort Necessity, a national battlefield that commemorates the disastrous beginning of the military career of the man who led the Revolutionary Army and became the first president. A short film and some displays inside the museum set the scene vividly enough that my 4-year-old son, who joined me on one of my forays, came to the astonished realization that not just in stories and games but sometimes in real life people shoot at each other. The year before Braddock’s march, Washington had set up camp here. On learning that a party of French soldiers was nearby, he led his men by night through steep woods and at dawn surprised the French and killed their captain, who France declared had been on a peaceful mission. The attack made international news, and opinion was sharply divided on the conduct of the young Lieutenant Colonel Washington. Those who said he was reckless pointed to his description of his first battle: “I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me there is something charming in the sound.” After the attack Washington retreated to his camp, dug trenches and erected a simple stockade in the meadow. It must have been very simple: The replica in the park today looks as if it could be a backyard project. On July 3, the French started firing from the surrounding woods. The park today — stockade, meadow, trenches, tree line — makes it easy to imagine the scene. After an all-day battle, Washington surrendered. A year later, Braddock’s army marched grimly past what was left of Fort Necessity. “There are many human bones all around ye spott,” an officer recorded. Continuing along Washington’s earlier route, they cut their road northward. In order to follow Braddock I had to leave Route 40 and take the Jumonville Road, which winds up through woodsy neighborhoods and runs past a tiny national park at Jumonville Glen. Small as it is, it was a highlight of our trip — one of those rare spots where you get a sharp sense of the long-ago event it enshrines, thanks to the fact that it has been left untouched. There, amid the chirpy stillness of the woods, is the rocky cliff where Washington’s men halted, and below it the defile where their French adversaries had hidden themselves. A shot rang out, and geopolitics changed. From here, Old Braddock Road, which becomes Mount Braddock Road, meanders ruggedly through close forest before coming out onto Route 119. This unevocative highway then follows Braddock’s route north to Connellsville. From this point there’s a clear shot to the end of the route in the form of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. That felt like cheating, and yet there is no single smaller road that follows the course. For guidance I had brought a map of the trail created in 1912 by John Lacock, that era’s Robert Bantz, as well as “Braddock’s Road,” a book that came out last year, in which Norman Baker, a former aerospace engineer, after close consultation with Mr. Bantz, tracked the route mile by mile. I also brought my car’s GPS. So I continued my westward trek by setting the GPS for the town or village that my sources indicated as the next marker — Hammondville, Mount Pleasant, Hunker, McKeesport — crisscrossing my way through the gathering suburbs. I was so intent on my triangulations that the end of the journey sneaked up on me — just as it did Braddock. Suddenly I was on the banks of the Monongahela River, blinking at the urban sprawl. I was not yet in Pittsburgh but in the town of North Braddock, a gritty suburb, seven miles from the Forks. Braddock’s army reached this spot on July 9, 1755. The general’s goal for the day was to cross the river. The next day, he had decided, his army would attack Fort Duquesne. He was sanguine, as he had been all along. After all, he was leading more than 2,000 men, while reports indicated that the French and Canadian soldiers numbered only several hundred, plus several hundred warriors from tribes that were known to be unreliable. Indeed, the French too knew that the numbers dramatically favored the English, which is why they decided to make a desperate charge at the enemy as they crossed the river. At first, the British soldiers did as they were trained to do when attacked: assumed positions and fired on the enemy. But the reaction they received confused them. Rather than maintaining formation, the French and their native allies ran into the forest. From behind trees, they returned fire. Forest fighting was precisely what Washington had been pushing Braddock to do, to no avail. One account of the battle said that Washington “begged the General, when he was first attacked, to let him draw off about 300 in each wing to scour the woods: but he refused it.” I have to admit that my imagination had difficulty rising to the challenge of summoning the sights and sounds of the three-hour battle amid the boarded-up storefronts and chain-link fences of North Braddock. There is a museum devoted to the battle, but it was closed on both occasions I visited. I had better luck driving around the greater Pittsburgh area armed with a map of Braddock’s route; this gave a sense of the complex geography his army faced. Braddock’s march ended in a defeat that probably surprised Braddock more than anyone. Since his arrival in America, the imperious 60-year-old officer had been convinced that British regular soldiers were superior to the French and the natives. He believed that the real enemy was nature, and that accomplishing his goal was a matter of engineering, organization and discipline. But his men were cut down by a smaller force. Braddock himself was shot while trying to hold the line. Washington helped carry him from the field; he died four days later. Washington, meanwhile, rallied the troops, probably averting a total rout, and brought them back near Fort Necessity, where he presided over the burial of Braddock — directly beneath the road the general had built. The monument to Braddock — a squat stone marker surrounded by an iron fence — sits alongside Route 40, just across the road from the entrance to the national park. History has depicted Braddock as a failure, but Washington had admiration — even affection — for his first commanding officer. In his final hours Braddock gave the young American his pistol and his ceremonial sash, which Washington treasured for the rest of his life. As I drove back from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, it occurred to me that Braddock’s expedition was every bit as momentous as the general had hoped it would be, but for entirely different reasons. In trying to force the Colonial governments to fund the expedition in the first place, Britain gave its colonists a premonition of how the mother country would financially squeeze them in the coming years. At the same time, the complex task of organizing the march afforded the Colonial governments a trial run at cooperation. Most notably, Braddock’s march would lift an obscure Virginia militiaman to international renown. Journals on both sides of the Atlantic singled Washington out for praise. A minister in New Jersey noted in his sermon the “heroic Youth Col. Washington, who I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto preserved in so signal a manner for some important Service to his Country.” Thus does history beget myth. Of all the historical consequences of Braddock’s road, one had eluded me until Robert Bantz pointed it out during our day of hiking. We were looking at a thick, broad slab of rock that lay astride one side of the forested trail. The rock was deeply grooved in the middle. What I hadn’t realized was that for the six decades between Braddock’s march and the construction of a national highway, the simple path that the ill-fated general had hacked served as the way west. It was followed by thousands of pioneers. I was swept by one of those rare shivers that come over you when the inchoate past reaches out to touch you. The erosion had been made by wagon wheels. This furrow in a rock buried deep in the woods of western Maryland told nothing less than the story of America. Russell Shorto is the author of “Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City,” out next month in paperback. ON THE TRAIL To reach a hikable stretch of Braddock’s trail through the woods on top of Big Savage Mountain, take exit 29 south off Route 68, turn left onto Beall School Road, follow the sign for Big Savage Mountain Hiking Trail. Braddock’s trail is beyond the Big Savage Mountain Hiking Trail, on an unpaved road. You will see signs for it. Where to Eat Café Mark, 37 Baltimore Street, Cumberland, Md.; cafemarkcumberland. The Crabby Pig (13 Canal Parkway, Cumberland; thecrabbypig) has great Maryland crab cakes. The Hen House (18072 National Pike, Frostburg; henhouserestaurant) is a big barn of a restaurant on Route 40, friendly and popular with locals. The Stone House (3023 National Pike, Farmington, Pa.; stonehouseinn/location), just west of Braddock’s grave on Route 40, has a wood-fired barbecue pit in the parking lot in warm months and serves pulled pork, ribs and brisket. What to See Allegany Museum (3 Pershing Street, Cumberland; alleganymuseummd.org) displays artifacts from Cumberland’s history, from the French and Indian War through the 20th century. Canal Place (Cumberland; canalplace.org); walk or cycle the C&O Canal from Cumberland to Washington, D.C. Fort Necessity National Battlefield (Farmington, Penn.; nps.gov/fone/index.htm) has a replica of the fort Washington built. Jumonville Glen (Jumonville Road, Farmington, Pa.; nps.gov/fone/jumglen.htm), site of Washington’s disastrous victory, is pristine and simple. Braddock’s Battlefield History Center (North Braddock, Pa.; braddocksbattlefield) has artifacts from the Battle of the Monongahela. A version of this article appears in print on July 20, 2014, on page TR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Into a New Land. Order Reprints|Todays Paper|Subscribe
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 08:28:12 +0000
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