The French and Indian War - The Road West

American Political History · Mar 1, 2023 · 25m

In the summer of 1755, the largest army ever assembled in North America began cutting a road through the Appalachian wilderness toward a French fort at the Forks of the Ohio — and carried west, in its own order of march, the seeds of its destruction. At its head rode a sixty-year-old British general who had never fought in a forest and could not imagine losing: Edward Braddock, who waved off Benjamin Franklin’s warning about ambush with the words “it is impossible they should make any impression.” Behind him marched a young Virginian named George Washington, on his third journey into this…