Fort Duquesne

November 25, 1758. A cold rain falls on the forks of the Ohio. Exhausted British and provincial soldiers, expecting a final desperate battle, instead find only smoking ruins where Fort Duquesne stood the day before. The French have blown up their own magazines and vanished up the Allegheny River in the night. No flags are struck. No volleys are fired. Yet in that quiet moment the strategic heart of North America changes hands forever.

This is the story of the Forbes Campaign, a six-month ordeal of axes, frostbite, and forced marches that finally broke French power in the Ohio Country. Led by a dying Scottish general and a Virginian colonel who had first tasted defeat on these same rivers four years earlier, a hybrid army cut a new road across the Alleghenies and forced the French to destroy the fort they could no longer hold. What followed was not just the birth of Fort Pitt and the city of Pittsburgh, but the opening of the American interior. This is how the continent’s future was decided, one muddy mile at a time.