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From Forts to Families: Following the Army into Western Pennsylvania, 1758–1766
| Like Cinderella, Cathrine Winepilt, Mrs. Middleton, and "Henery's" wife dropped their slippers and disappeared.1 They were among the colonial British women who stirred embers and ashes in camp and cabin fireplaces; women who had followed troops, traders, and farmers into the wilderness castles that were supposed to mark and defend civilization from savagery, British territory from French and Indian. They may have danced in those North American woodlands, but more often they drudged. That toil supported imperial claims and defense. Yet their contributions, and those of most other civilians with the armed forces engaged in the American campaigns of the Seven Years' War, were not celebrated in the official accounts that recorded military actions. Letters, journal entries, and orders from Brigadier General John Forbes's campaign in 1758 through Colonel Henry Bouquet's command of the troops in the Ohio Country to 1765, however, acknowledge their participation in the initial penetration and settlement of the old Old West, though usually in the context of noting the problems they caused. Other literary and material artifacts, such as frontier narratives and the numerous women's shoes found at Fort Ligonier in western Pennsylvania, also reveal both their presence and the difficulties they endured. |
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The women and their families dealt with the same hardships as the soldiers: culture shock, isolation, poor living conditions, numbing routines and boredom, intense physical labor, harsh discipline, disease, and the possibility of capture and death. Yet they persevered, and their growing presence—disruptive as it was at times—served to anchor both soldiers and civilians to the posts in particular and the backcountry in general. Their work helped preserve the troops that protected civilian traders and farmers. As these women rooted and maintained the forces in this frontier, the British army stimulated trans-Appalachian settlement by planting forts to secure the territory and by fostering communities at those forts. The latter occurred because other civilians followed the women's example and trailed the forces. Furthermore, some soldiers became traders and farmers upon leaving the service and settled along the routes they had hewed and near the forts they had guarded. Some men who had served in Forbes's campaign in 1758 (and a few surviving returnees from Major General Edward Braddock's expedition in 1755) settled in what became Westmoreland County, where they and their families could support and be supported by Fort Ligonier. In 1763, for example, just days after childbirth, the wife of Andrew Byerly (a former soldier turned settler) fled to Fort Ligonier with her children to escape attacks during the Indian rebellion known as Pontiac's War. Settlement in the Ohio Country, specifically trans-Alleghenies Pennsylvania, was thus spearheaded as much by women and the army as by trappers, traders, diplomats, and missionaries to the Native Americans.2 The military established a material framework of roads, buildings, and ordinances as well as ordnance. The women, in turn, provided social substance. |
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The contention that the army helped establish civil society in this territory challenges the general notion that the British army repressed colonial settlement in the West, especially after the Proclamation of 1763. The army did take official control of the Ohio Country when it became a theater of military operations. That continued after the official end of the Seven Years' War due to the Indian resistance of Pontiac's Rebellion. Moreover, because the 1758 Easton Treaty, subsequent Privy Council instructions, and the Proclamation of 1763 presented intentions to prevent white settlement on the frontier, the army did have a duty to contain growth. The British army found, however, that securing sovereignty of the frontier required such civilian support that it could not, would not, stop all the people who followed it into the territory. But it did endeavor to regulate them. It had to, for it did not appear that the colonial governments and backcountry communities had much control over those trading and settling in the West.3 |
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