The greatest curse that our Lord can pronounce against the worst of sinners is to give them business to do with provincial commissioners and friendly Indians.”  A band of sixty warriors told Colonel Burd that they would join the army on condition that it went by Braddock’s road.  “This,” wrote Forbes, on hearing of the proposal, “is a new system of military discipline truly, and shows that my good friend Burd is either made a cat’s-foot of himself, or little knows me if he imagines that sixty scoundrels are to direct me in my measures."[650] Bouquet, with a pliant tact rarely seen in the born Briton, took great pains to please these troublesome allies, and went so far as to adopt one of them as his son.[651] A considerable number joined the army; but they nearly all went off when the stock of presents provided for them was exhausted.

[Footnote 650:  The above extracts are from the Bouquet and Haldimand Papers, British Museum.]

[Footnote 651:  Bouquet to Forbes, 3 June, 1758.]

Forbes was in total ignorance of the strength and movements of the enemy.  The Indians reported their numbers to be at least equal to his own; but nothing could be learned from them with certainty, by reason of their inveterate habit of lying.  Several scouting-parties of whites were therefore sent forward, of which the most successful was that of a young Virginian officer, accompanied by a sergeant and five Indians.  At a little distance from the French fort, the Indians stopped to paint themselves and practise incantations.  The chief warrior of the party then took certain charms from an otter-skin bag and tied them about the necks of the other Indians.  On that of the officer he hung the otter-skin itself; while to the sergeant he gave a small packet of paint from the same mystic receptacle.  “He told us,” reports the officer, “that none of us could be shot, for those things would turn the balls from us; and then shook hands with us, and told us to go and fight like men.”  Thus armed against fate, they mounted the high ground afterwards called Grant’s Hill, where, covered by trees and bushes, they had a good view of the fort, and saw plainly that the reports of the French force were greatly exaggerated.[652]

[Footnote 652:  Journal of a Reconnoitring Party, Aug. 1758. The writer seems to have been Ensign Chew, of Washington’s regiment.]

Meanwhile Bouquet’s men pushed on the heavy work of road-making up the main range of the Alleghanies, and, what proved far worse, the parallel mountain ridge of Laurel Hill, hewing, digging, blasting, laying fascines and gabions to support the track along the sides of steep declivities, or worming their way like moles through the jungle of swamp and forest.  Forbes described the country to Pitt as an “immense uninhabited wilderness, overgrown everywhere with trees and brushwood, so that nowhere can one see twenty yards.”  In truth, as far as eye or mind could reach, a prodigious forest vegetation spread its impervious canopy over hill, valley, and plain, and wrapped the stern and awful waste in the shadows of the tomb.