A history of Canada, 1763-1812

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

Henry Bouquet.

Henry Bouquet had reason to be bitter. He had rendered invaluable service to Pennsylvania and Virginia, when under Forbes he had driven the French from the Ohio valley. The colonies concerned had been backward then, they were now more wrong-headed than ever, and this at a time when the English army in America was sadly attenuated in numbers. All depended upon one or two men, principally upon Bouquet himself. Born in Canton Berne, he was one of the Swiss officers who were given commissions in the Royal American Regiment, the ancestors of the King’s Royal Rifles, another being Captain Ecuyer, who was at this time commander at Fort Pitt. Bouquet was now in his forty-fourth year, a resolute, high-minded man, a tried soldier, and second to none in knowledge of American border fighting. In the spring of 1763 he was at Philadelphia, when Amherst, still holding supreme command in North America, ordered him to march to the relief of Fort Pitt, while Dalyell was sent along the lakes to bring succour to Detroit. At the end of June Bouquet was at Carlisle, collecting troops, transport, and provisions for his expedition; on the 3rd of July he heard the bad news of the loss of the forts at Presque Isle, Le Bœuf, and Venango; on the 25th of July he reached Bedford.

He marches to the relief of Fort Pitt.

He had a difficult and dangerous task before him. The rough road through the forest and over the mountains had been broken up by bad weather in the previous winter, and the temporary bridges had been swept away. His fighting men did not exceed 500, Highlanders of the 42nd and 77th Regiments, and Royal Americans. The force was far too small for the enterprise, and the commander wrote of the disadvantage which he suffered from want of men used to the woods, noting that the Highlanders invariably lost themselves when employed as scouts, and that he was therefore compelled to try and secure 30 woodsmen for scouting purposes.[12]

On the 2nd of August he reached Fort Ligonier, and there, as on the former expedition, he left his heavy transport, moving forward on the 4th with his little army on a march of over fifty miles to Fort Pitt. On that day he advanced twelve miles. On the 5th of August he intended to The fight at Edgehill. reach a stream known as Bushy Creek or Bushy Run, nineteen miles distant. Seventeen miles had been passed by midday in the hot summer weather, when at one o’clock, at a place which in his dispatch he called Edgehill, the advanced guard was attacked by Indians. The attack increased in severity, the flanks of the force and the convoy in the rear were threatened, the troops were drawn back to protect the convoy, and circling round it they held the enemy at bay till nightfall, when they were forced to encamp where they stood, having lost 60 men in killed and wounded, and, worst of all, being in total want of water. Bravely Bouquet wrote to Amherst that night, but the terms of the dispatch told his anxiety for the morrow. At daybreak the Indians fell again upon the wearied, thirsty ring of troops: for some hours the fight went on, and a repetition of Braddock’s overthrow seemed inevitable. At length Bouquet tried a stratagem. Drawing back the two front companies of the circle, he pretended to cover their retreat with a scanty line, and lured the Indians on in mass, impatient of victorious butchery. Just as they were breaking the circle, the men who had been brought back and had unperceived crept round in the woods, gave a point blank fire at close quarters into the yelling crowd, and followed it with the bayonet. Falling back, the Indians came under similar fire and a similar charge from two other companies who waited them in ambush, and leaving the ground strewn with corpses the red men broke and fled. Litters were then made for the wounded: such provisions as could not be carried were destroyed; and at length the sorely tried English reached the stream of Bushy Run. Even there the enemy attempted to molest them, but were easily dispersed by the light infantry.

Victory of the English and relief of Fort Pitt.

The victory had been won, but hardly won. The casualties in the two days’ fighting numbered 115. That the whole force was not exterminated was due to the extraordinary steadiness of the troops, notably the Highlanders, and to the resolute self-possession of their leader. ‘Never found my head so clear as that day,’ wrote Bouquet to a friend some weeks later, ‘and such ready and cheerful compliance to all the necessary orders.’[13] On the 10th of August the expedition reached Fort Pitt without further fighting, and relieved the garrison, whose defence of the post had merited the efforts made for their rescue.

Importance of Bouquet’s victory.

Bouquet’s battles at Edgehill were small in the number of troops employed, and were fought far away in the American backwoods. They attracted little notice in England—to judge from Horace Walpole’s contemptuous reference to ‘half a dozen battles in miniature with the Indians in America’;[14] but none the less they were of vital importance. Attacking with every advantage on their side, with superiority of numbers, in summer heat, among their own woods, the Indians had been signally defeated, and among the dead were some of their best fighting chiefs. In Bouquet’s words, ‘the most warlike of the savage tribes have lost their boasted claim of being invincible in the woods;’[15] and he continued to urge the necessity of reinforcements in order to follow up the blow and carry the warfare into the enemy’s country. But the colonies did not answer, the war dragged on, and at the beginning of October Bouquet had the mortification of hearing of a British reverse at Niagara.

British reverse at Niagara.