Source:Lytle-jumonville/content
A wealth of romance is embodied in the historical background of Pittsburgh's street names. Some were written in blood. Some recall men of the sword who swaggered across the pages of this city's early history with a dash and color belonging to a bygone age. This is the fifth and last in a series of articles on the story behind the names of certain street signs.
It was as dark as the inside of a cave along the mountain trail. The night was so utterly black that a man could not see his neighbor a few paces in front.
No one talked in the column of 80 men that hurried along the mountainside, slipping on the rocks and clutching at overhanging rhododendron. There was no sound but that of powder horns thumping against gunstocks; the steady downpour of rain, now and then a muttered curse as a man fell in the mud.
Some of the men held their guns under their great coats to keep the priming dry. Others were wrapped in blankets. Some wore the cocked hats of the settlements, and others fur caps. The rain poured out from the corners of the cocked hats as it does from the end of a gutter spout. Wet smells came from the woods—laurel and pine and fern.
They had been hurrying on through the May night that way since two Indian runners from Tanacharison reached the camp at Great Meadows. Tanacharison was the chief whom the English called the Half King, for he ruled the Delawares and the Mohicans in the name of the Six Nations.
Washington Talks to Chief
Back along the trail the guides had led them to the camp of the Half King, with fires drizzling in the rain in a hiding place shut in by huge boulders. The men crouched beneath the hemlock trees while young Colonel Washington talked to the Half King. the gray light of dawn was beginning to break the darkness. The Half King's camp was two miles north of what is now the Summit, beyond Uniontown.
Six miles away a young French ensign named Jumonville walked to the edge of a camp hidden in a ravine and looked at the sky. The rain had turned to a drizzle. Death was marching toward him along the mountain trail, but he could not know that, and he was wondering what the weather would be like tomorrow.
The English column was moving at a still faster pace, with Washington and the Half King in the lead. Orders against talking had been positive. Each man looked again to the priming of his gun. The Virginia colonel and the Half King talked in low voices. They came to the head of a ravine, and the Half King pointed down the slope beyond moss-grown boulders and a heavy growth of laurel. The blue smoke of the French campfires was drifting up from the ravine. The men above could smell wood burning.
The white men filed off along the ravine to the right. The Indians, their faces masked beneath the bright colors of their war paint, closed in on the left.
A soldier slipped on a loose rock. It rolled down the side of the ravine. Alarmed voices cried out in French.
Jumonville Is Killed
A roar of musketry shattered the peace of the glen. White puffs of smoke leaped from behind trees and rocks on the hillside, where the Virginia militia had taken shelter. In the bottom of the ravine, the Frenchmen were scrambling for cover, firing up at the puffs of smoke on the hillside.
It didn't last more than 15 minutes. A voice from the depths of the ravine called for quarter. Twelve of the French soldiers from Fort Duquesne had been killed. Twenty-one were captured.
Young Jumonville lay on his face in a patch of ferns, with his blood creeping out across the green fronds. His sword lay a few paces in front of his outstretched hands. The heavy hilt had crushed a May apple plant as it fell. The man in the white uniform of the French king had come a long way to die in a ravine in the wilderness. Almost two centuries later people would walk along a street in Pittsburgh named for him.
That battle in the woods, May 23, 1754, was the beginning of a war that was to place control of North America in the hands of England. Before the firing begun in the Pennsylvania woods had ceased, cannon would shake the rocky citadel of Quebec, and French and English bayonets would cross in the battle smoke at Montreal, Louisburg, Niagara and in a hundred forgotten clearings in the wilderness.
On two sides of the Atlantic a controversy raged over the shooting of Jumonville. The French claimed he had been an ambassador, carrying a warning to the English forces from Contrecoeur, Jumonville's half brother, and that he had been assassinated.
Washington Defends Self
Washington pointed out that if the French had been on a diplomatic mission they would not have remained hidden in a ravine near his camp for two days, and further emphasized that the enemy had jumped for their guns with alacrity.
When Washington surrendered to Contrecoeur at Fort Necessity a few days later, the French incorporated in the articles of surrender the word "assassination" in reference to Jumonville's death. The Virginia colonel did not understand that such was the meaning of the papers, and was indignant that Van Braam, his Dutch interpreter, had not given him the proper shading of the word.
Van Braam was delivered up as a hostage at the surrender of Fort Necessity, for the return of two cadets, an officer and the enlisted men taken at Jumonville's surrender. When Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia, refused to abide by the terms, after the controversy began, and would not return the French prisoners.
Liked to Hear Bullets
Washington had in his forces a French Protestant chevalier, who might have interpreted the papers correctly, when they were read in a downpour of rain, but this officer was among the severely wounded. He was Ensign Peyronie, who was killed next year as a Captain under Braddock.
It was reported to George II that Washington said after the skirmish with Jumonville's men, "I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me, there was something charming in the sound."
"He would not say so if he had been used to hear many," the King remarked.
