y escaped. The French
and Indian loss was not much over fifty.

This defeat of Braddock's force has become one of the most famous
reverses in history; and it was made worse by the conduct of Dunbar who
had been left in command of the artillery, baggage, and men in the rear.
He could have remained where he was as some sort of protection to the
frontier. But he took fright, burned his wagons, emptied his barrels of
powder into the streams, destroyed his provisions, and fled back to Fort
Cumberland in Maryland. Here the governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia
as well as the Pennsylvania Assembly urged him to stay. But, determined
to make the British rout complete, he soon retreated to the peace and
quiet of Philadelphia, and nothing would induce him to enter again the
terrible forests of Pennsylvania.

The natural result of the blunder soon followed. The French, finding
the whole frontier of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia abandoned,
organized the Indians under French officers and swept the whole region
with a devastation of massacre, scalping, and burning that has never
been equaled. Hurons, Potawatomies, Ojibways, Ottawas, Mingoes,
renegades from the Six Nations, together with the old treaty friends of
Penn, the Delawares and Shawanoes, began swarming eastward and soon
had killed more people than had been lost at Braddock's defeat. The
onslaught reached its height in September and October. By that time all
the outlying frontier settlers and their families had been killed or
sent flying eastward to seek refuge in the settlements. The Indians even
followed them to the settlements, reached the Susquehanna, and crossed
it. They massacred the people of the village of Gnadenhutten, near
Bethlehem on the Lehigh, and established near by a headquarters for
prisoners and plunder. Families were scalped within fifty miles of
Philadelphia, and in one instance the bodies of a murdered family
were brought into the town and exhibited in the streets to show the
inhabitants how near the danger was approaching. Nothing could be done
to stem the savage tide. Virginia was suffering in the same way: the
settlers on her border were slaughtered or were driven back in herds
upon the more settled districts, and Washington, with a nominal strength
of fifteen hundred who would not obey orders, was forced to stand
a helpless spectator of the general flight and misery. There was no
adequate force or army anywhere within reach. The British had be