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The men endeavored to allay their fears, and urged them to be more composed; but while this took place "our eyes were caught, on a sudden, by the appearance of the army coming out of the woods into the fields belonging to Emmor Jefferis, on the west side of the creek, above the fording-place. In a few minutes the fields were literally covered over with them, and they were hastening toward us.
A company of rangers, supported by detachments of regulars, was sent into the neighboring forest to protect the parties who were cutting fascines, and apparently, also, to look for a fording-place. Lévis, with his Scotch-Jacobite aide-de-camp, Johnstone, had watched the movements of Wolfe from the heights across the cataract.
The river, at the fording-place, was broad and rapid, but shallow; the principal difficulties in the ford arose from the number of smooth round stones, covered with green rince slime, which formed the bed of the river, and over which our horses stumbled, with a violence which threatened to disturb the fastening of their burdens.
This we followed, and crossed it at a suitable fording-place where the stream was twenty-five yards across. The water reached up to our waists. We found here another mani wall with large inscriptions on stones. As the wind was high and cutting, we used the wall as a shelter for the night. We could see in the distance the snowy Himahlyan chain.
Three hundred of them left him, went off in another direction, and did not rejoin him till the English had crossed the river. Hence perhaps it was that, having left Fort Duquesne at eight o'clock, he spent half the day in marching seven miles, and was more than a mile from the fording-place when the British reached the eastern shore.
The party found the stream very much swollen by the melting of the snows in the mountains. When they arrived at its fording-place, notwithstanding a torrent rolled before them, the command was, of a necessity, given to cross. There was no shrinking. Without a single murmur, the entire command set themselves about the perilous task. The bed of the river at this place is rocky and shelving.
Nooney begged some tobacco and pointed out a fording-place and gave me the "parole." This, very fittingly, was "Kanawha." He said I would speedily make the camp and that Colonel Lewis was with the first troops. I lost no time in crossing and had barely cleared the river-bank before I was held up by an outpost. This fellow knew nothing of military red-tape.
From the point at which they stood and toward Chapman's, the land was surveyed; but to the westward the surveys ran only just across the creek, which, curving from the north and west, made a complete circuit around the land and emptied into the Fork, just below the fording-place. Inside of that circuit, the land, undulating, and lying with a southern exposure, was destitute of trees.
With the close of the Revolution, came a rush of travel down the great river. With the latter, this sketch has naught to do. By the close of the Revolution, Pittsburg in Gist's day, but a squalid Indian village, and a fording-place was still only "a distant out-post, merely a foothold in the Far West."
It was near one o'clock when Braddock crossed the Monongahela for the second time. If the French made a stand anywhere, it would be, he thought, at the fording-place; but Lieutenant-Colonel Gage, whom he sent across with a strong advance-party, found no enemy, and quietly took possession of the farther shore. Then the main body followed.
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