On May 28, 1754, a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant colonel named George Washington stood in the near-total darkness of a starless night, looking down on an encampment of French Canadian soldiers in a glen roughly sixty miles east of Pittsburgh. Flanked by forty Virginia troops and a dozen Iroquois warriors, Washington was about to trigger a battle that would define his life and help ignite a war between two empires. For years, France and Britain had been pushing toward a collision in North America. New France stretched from eastern Canada through the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, and the French coveted the Ohio Country, present-day Ohio, Indiana, and parts of western Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
The British claimed the same territory through a royal grant to the Ohio Company, which had been entrusted with encouraging settlement and protecting colonists from French encroachment. Among the strongest advocates of British expansion was Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia, a major stockholder in the Ohio Company. In 1753, after learning that the French were building forts near Lake Erie, Dinwiddie sent an eight-man expedition to demand their withdrawal. He chose a young major from the Virginia militia to lead it: George Washington.
Washington’s orders, handed down from London and signed by King George II, were blunt. If the French were building forts on English soil, they were to be asked peacefully to depart. If they refused, Washington was authorized to drive them off by force of arms. In December 1753, Washington’s party headed northwest into the Ohio territory.
At Logstown, he met with the Seneca chief Tanacharison, known as the Half King, a man deeply resentful of the French. The French commander had once thrown a wampum belt to the floor, telling the chief that he despised everything he had said and would tread under foot all who opposed him. The Half King had particular reason to distrust the French, who he felt treated his people as annoyances rather than equals. He gave Washington the nickname Conotocarious, meaning town taker and destroyer of villages, a name Washington accepted with pride.
The journey to the French fort was brutal. Washington and his men trudged through freezing rain, bitter wind, and thick mud for days. At the trading post of Venango, French officers revealed their ambition to take possession of the Ohio over generous amounts of wine. Pressing on, Washington and frontiersman Christopher Gist pushed ahead of their party through swamps and freezing waters until they reached Fort Le Bœuf on December 11.
The one-eyed French commander, Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, was hospitable but firm. He told Washington he was not obliged to obey the British demand and that the French had every right to capture British traders in the Ohio country. Washington took careful notes on the fort’s hundreds of canoes and its stockpiled armaments, then began the journey back. The return nearly killed him.
The horses were abandoned. Washington and Gist set out on foot, nearly capsizing their canoe in icy water. A French Indian guide led them deep into the wilderness, then suddenly turned and fired at them from ten yards away. Gist tackled the man and was about to kill him when Washington ordered him to stop.
They bound the guide and released him at dusk, then hiked through the night fearing pursuit. The next day, they built a makeshift raft to cross the Allegheny River. The current slammed the raft into a chunk of ice, throwing Washington into the freezing water. He seized a floating piece of the wreckage and survived, while Gist suffered frostbite on his fingers and toes.
On January 16, 1754, Washington reached Williamsburg with the French response in hand. Governor Dinwiddie asked Washington to compile his notes into a report. The resulting journal was published across the colonies and printed in London as a pamphlet, thrusting Washington’s name into public view for the first time. He was paid fifty pounds, which he considered insulting, but he parlayed the expedition into a promotion to lieutenant colonel around his twenty-second birthday.
Dinwiddie ordered the construction of a fort at the Forks of the Ohio, a location Washington had suggested. Washington was told to gather whatever forces he could and march there that spring. His forces were a ragged band of only about one hundred and sixty men, some of them loose, idle persons destitute of house and home. Washington sought red uniforms like those worn by His Majesty’s troops, but colonial regiments were treated as second-class soldiers, a grievance that would follow him throughout his service.
On April 2, 1754, he marched west with his green recruits. Three weeks into the journey, unsettling intelligence arrived: more than a thousand French troops had overwhelmed the British at the Forks of the Ohio, and the fort had fallen and been renamed Fort Duquesne. On the night of May 24, scouts reported that a French platoon had crossed the river and was camping just eighteen miles away. Washington took up a defensive position at Great Meadows.
The Half King rejoined him and confirmed that a rogue band of French Canadians had set up camp only seven miles from their position. Unwilling to wait to be ambushed, Washington changed course. He gathered forty men, a dozen of them natives, and set out on a rainy, moonless night to find the French camp. The darkness was so total that seven soldiers wandered off in the woods, unwilling to cry out for fear of revealing their position.
In the pre-dawn hours of May 28, the Half King guided Washington to a rocky hollow above the sleeping French camp. The warriors slipped through the trees to surround it. When the French heard the movement and reached for their arms, shots rang out. Washington’s men fired two quick volleys that left at least ten French soldiers dead.
The rest surrendered. But the battle took a dark turn. The Half King approached the wounded French officer, Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, and told him in French that he was not yet dead. Then he raised his hatchet and struck the officer’s skull several times, reaching his hand into the wound and rubbing the blood into his own flesh.
Washington was stunned. He had suffered one man killed and three wounded, and he knew that criticizing the Half King could shatter their fragile alliance. In his report to Governor Dinwiddie, he emphasized French aggression and espionage, presenting himself as the victim of a sneak attack. The French told a different story, one that would be used to brand Washington a murderer and inflame relations between the empires.
The French counterattack came soon enough. Washington ordered his men to dig a circular fortification that would come to be known as Fort Necessity. In the battle that followed, the young lieutenant colonel was captured by his newfound enemies, marking the beginning of a conflict that would grow into the French and Indian War. Seven years later, on September 13, 1778, a different legendary frontiersman crouched behind the wooden walls of Boonesborough, Kentucky, in the dim light of dawn.
Daniel Boone had fifty men with him, and they knew the Shawnee were coming. They did not know when. Then the tree line exploded in a fireball, and bullets slammed into the fort walls, sending splinters flying. War cries rose from three directions at once.
The Shawnee had returned, attacking from every side. Boone knew many of the warriors surrounding the fort personally. Their chief, Blackfish, had adopted him as a son. Now they meant to kill him, and many of the men beside him suspected he might be a spy.
Boone’s journey to this moment had begun the previous winter, when he led thirty men to the Blue Licks, a saline spring in northern Kentucky, to boil water down for salt. The fighting with the Shawnee had largely halted for the winter, and the men believed they had purchased the land legally three years earlier. They had, but they had bought it from the Cherokee, who had no jurisdiction there. The land belonged to the Shawnee, who saw the settlers as intruders deserving death.
With guns supplied by British agents from Fort Detroit, the Shawnee and their allies intended to reclaim their homeland. Shawnee scouts followed Boone’s party from the start. When Boone ventured out to hunt for fresh meat, he was surrounded by roughly one hundred warriors under Chief Blackfish. Boone leveraged his reputation to negotiate for his life and the lives of his men, convincing the Shawnee that the settlers were worth more as prisoners.
Blackfish honored his word, and the twenty-eight captives were marched one hundred and sixty miles to the Shawnee village of Chillicothe. Boone impressed his captors so deeply that Blackfish adopted him as a son. Boone was given the name Sheltowee, meaning Big Turtle, and learned the Shawnee language, joining hunting and scouting parties. He even accompanied a delegation to British-held Fort Detroit, where the British attempted to buy his release.
The Shawnee refused. In the spring of 1778, Boone found himself torn between two worlds. He had a wife and children waiting at Boonesborough. But he had also come to identify with the Shawnee people who had accepted him as one of their own.
Then word arrived that the Shawnee were amassing for an all-out assault on Boonesborough. That was the breaking point. Boone slipped away while out on a hunting party and made his way on foot back to the fort, where he found an icy greeting. His family, except his daughter Jemima, had retreated east, and reports had spread that he was living with the Shawnee, wearing their clothing and cutting his hair in their style.
He warned the settlers of the coming attack, and his warnings were taken seriously enough that the fort went into feverish preparation. For months they worked. Boone’s brother Squire, a noted inventor, cut angles into the firing ports so men could shoot with minimal exposure, built a water supply system from dugout logs, and designed a primitive cannon from hollowed logs bound with iron rings. On September 7, a Shawnee force of four hundred to six hundred arrived, led by Chief Blackfish and flying a British flag.
Blackfish came forward with overtures of peace. Boone and eight others went out to meet him, but at a signal the warriors tried to seize them. Boone’s party escaped back into the fort, and the siege began. For nine days, the Shawnee hammered the fort.
Sniper fire was exchanged. The Shawnee tried to burn the fort down, but Squire Boone’s water system and bucket lines of women and children quenched the flames. They dug a tunnel toward the walls, but abandoned it after a warrior was killed near the entrance. On the seventh day, Blackfish ordered a coordinated attack on three sides at once.
Warriors rolled burning brush against the palisade and hurled torches inside. Smoke covered the battlefield, and the defenders fired at shadows and flashes. Chief Blackfish rotated fresh warriors into the fight, but Boone’s men had no relief. For hours, women melted lead for ammunition and reloaded weapons while the men fired.
A section of the southern wall nearly fell, and Boone, Squire, and others fought at point blank range for thirty minutes before the warriors fell back. Just before sunset, Blackfish ordered one final massive charge against the weakened wall. This time the defenders inflicted enough losses to break the Shawnee morale, and the warriors withdrew, leaving more than three dozen dead. Boone ordered double sentries posted and told the exhausted men to rest.
He knew the Shawnee would return. He was right. Blackfish resumed tunneling, but the settlers dug a counter-tunnel and flooded it. The next day, the Shawnee charged the southern wall again and were rebuffed again.
After ten days of siege, scouts reported that the Shawnee were moving their wounded north of the Ohio River. Blackfish had concluded the fort could not be taken without artillery. The Shawnee had lost thirty-seven warriors and two settlers had died, but Boonesborough survived. When the gates opened, the Shawnee were gone.
The aftermath was complicated. The Shawnee chief Blackfish would die in 1779 in an assault on Fort Randolph. Boone himself faced a court-martial in 1778 on charges that he had surrendered his men at Blue Licks too easily and conspired with the Shawnee. He defended himself and was acquitted.
The war between Boone and the Shawnee was far from over, and the coming years would bring countless engagements and devastating personal losses that would change his life forever. Eight years later, on March 6, 1836, dawn broke over San Antonio, Texas, and cannon fire filled the air. Davy Crockett and the defenders of the Alamo unleashed volley after volley into Mexican soldiers scrambling up wooden ladders against the mission walls. Men fell to his left and right.
Below, Mexican troops swarmed toward the breach being blown open in the adobe walls. Crockett and his comrades were vastly outnumbered and knew they were in a fight to the death. Crockett was already a national celebrity, a legendary hunter, frontiersman, master storyteller, and former congressman who had met presidents and attended high society parties in New York and Washington. He had been born in Tennessee in 1786, served in the War of 1812 under Andrew Jackson, and entered politics after captivating audiences with his earthy tales of frontier life.
He had served in Congress from 1827, famously breaking with Jackson to oppose the Indian Removal Act of 1830, a stance that cost him his seat. He lost reelection in 1831, regained it in 1833, and lost again to a Jacksonian named Adam Huntsman in 1835. Frustrated, he declared his constituents could go to hell and announced he was going to Texas. Texas was a tinderbox.
Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna had ordered troops to occupy northern Mexican towns, inflaming the Anglo settlers and Tejanos alike. When the Mexican government demanded that the town of Gonzales surrender a pair of cannons loaned for defense against the Comanche, the settlers refused, raised a flag reading Come and take it, and drove the Mexican soldiers back on October 2, 1835. The Texas Revolution had begun. The Texans seized the presidio at Goliad, won the Battle of Concepción, and captured San Antonio in December, taking over the old mission known as the Alamo and fortifying it for Santa Anna’s inevitable return.
By the time Crockett arrived at the Alamo on February 8, 1836, with roughly thirty volunteers, command had passed to two men. Colonel William B. Travis was a twenty-six-year-old Alabama lawyer and revolutionary firebrand. Jim Bowie was a forty-two-year-old frontiersman and real estate speculator, famous for the knife fight that gave his name to the blade he carried, and now gravely ill with what was likely typhoid pneumonia.
All three men believed victory was at hand. It was not. Santa Anna was already marching north from Mexico City with thousands of troops, determined to erase the shame of his earlier defeat. On February 23, only two weeks after Crockett’s arrival, cavalry was spotted near San Antonio.
Between 1,500 and 1,800 Mexican troops surrounded the roughly 180 defenders. Travis and Bowie ordered every Texian into the Alamo, their only refuge in the city. For thirteen days, the Mexican army laid siege, pounding the walls with artillery and sending envoys demanding surrender. All were refused.
On February 24, Travis wrote a letter pleading for reinforcements, vowing never to surrender or retreat, and closing with the words victory or death. Captain Albert Martin smuggled it out of the city and delivered it to Gonzales, seventy-five miles east. Only thirty-one men from Gonzales answered the call. Santa Anna raised the black flag of no quarter, signaling that none would be spared.
One man, a Lewis Rose, chose to escape with his life. Everyone else stayed. At dawn on March 6, Santa Anna ordered the assault. Travis was shot dead with a musket ball through the forehead defending the north wall.
Bowie, bedridden and unable to stand, was killed by Mexican soldiers with their bayonets. Crockett, one of the last men standing, kept firing until he ran out of ammunition, then fought with his rifle as a club and his hunting knife. Exactly how he died is uncertain. Some accounts say he was shot in the final stages of the fight.
Others say he was captured and executed on Santa Anna’s orders. His cause of death is unknown, but his fate was the same as all the others. The Mexican troops stacked the bodies in piles and burned them, denying the defenders funerals and proper graves. Santa Anna expected the destruction of the Alamo to break the Texan will.
Instead, it produced the opposite result. The battle became a rallying cry, and cries of Remember the Alamo resounded across the battlefield at San Jacinto in April 1836, where Santa Anna was forced to surrender and Texas won its independence. Without the sacrifice of the men inside the Alamo, that victory might never have come. Eighteen years earlier, on January 26, 1856, a cold wind rolled off the Pacific as Nisqually warriors lay quiet in the woods surrounding the cabin of a settler named Tom Pepper outside Seattle.
They were waiting for the moment to launch an ambush, the first step in an attack on the settlement itself. Just as the first rays of sunlight appeared, a thunderous boom came from the bay. Seconds later, a hillside exploded. An artillery shell from the USS Decatur, anchored in Puget Sound, had torn into the earth and shattered their plans.
The attack on Pepper’s cabin was abandoned, and the warriors turned their attention to the fortified blockhouses defending the town. Tensions between settlers and native tribes had been building for years. After the United States formally recognized Washington Territory in 1853, treaties were struck with the tribes, but the agreements were often broken as settlement expanded beyond the agreed bounds. The Treaty of Medicine Creek in 1854 had cost the Nisqually their prime farming territory.
A chief named Leschi had been among the most vocal critics, marching to Olympia to demand a meeting with Governor Isaac Stevens, who refused to see him. When Chief Leschi opposed an attack on Seattle, his words fell on deaf ears. In the weeks before the attack, Nisqually warriors had raided settlements on nearby White River, killing several Americans. Governor Stevens dismissed the danger and left the settlement unprotected.
Now the attack had come, and the settlement descended into chaos. Marines and sailors manned the blockhouses and fired into the oncoming warriors, but many local militiamen proved combat ineffective, hiding behind the wooden breastworks or abandoning their positions. Fifty-two women and children were evacuated to the Decatur. The marine third division disobeyed orders and mounted a head-on charge, driving back one faction of warriors and buying precious time, though an errant shot killed a young boy named Milton Holgate.
South of town, a gunfight raged for hours across boggy ground, claiming the life of a settler named Christian White, who stuck his head out from behind a log to drink from a stream. As the afternoon wore on, the warriors’ morale began to erode. They had taken more casualties than expected, and the Decatur’s cannon fire made a full takeover seem impossible. Their plan had been carefully timed to strike when the militia’s enlistments expired and the Decatur, badly damaged on a reef the week before and beached for repairs, seemed unable to fight.
But the ship had been repaired, and the attack had gone wrong in nearly every way. By early evening, the warriors withdrew. Roughly twenty-eight of them were dead. The Americans had lost three.
The next day brought no attack, and news that Governor Stevens was returning on the USS Active. He appeared contrite and ordered the city fortified, then returned to Olympia to raise the alarm. Several days later, Chief Leschi appeared at the ranch of a local settler and pleaded his innocence, insisting he was not involved in the attack on Seattle. In 1857, he was arrested for the murder of a militiaman during the Puget Sound War.
His first trial ended in a hung jury. A retrial was ordered, and Governor Stevens pressured officials for a conviction. The second trial produced a guilty verdict, and Leschi was sentenced to hang. The sentence was seen as a travesty of justice.
The local sheriff submitted to arrest rather than carry out the hanging, and officers at the fort protested that the killing Leschi had done had been in battle, not murder. On February 19, 1858, Chief Leschi walked to the gallows accompanied by the fort’s Catholic priest. Eyewitnesses described him as dignified and courageous, but all remarked on the great injustice of his death. Governor Stevens’s reputation never recovered.
He was called back to duty at the outbreak of the Civil War, promoted to brigadier general on September 1, 1862, and killed eleven days later at the Battle of Chantilly after carrying the regimental colors when his color bearer was wounded. Chief Leschi’s execution had come only four years earlier. The Battle of Seattle had produced relatively few casualties, but its ripple effects resounded through the Pacific Northwest for decades. Seattle grew from a small settlement into a bustling port city and eventually a modern metropolis of more than eight hundred thousand people.
Most of its residents will never know that in 1856, life and death hung in the balance on the muddy streets near the bay, in a battle that helped shape both the city and the fate of the native peoples who had called that land home for thousands of years.