In the October 2019 issue of Smithsonian, I wrote about a 1754 document I discovered in the British National Archives: an eyewitness account from an Ohio Iroquois warrior who identified Washington as having fired the first shot in the skirmish that sparked the war. Now, as British troops closed in on the Ohio Valley, Washington was about to play a key role in the conflict’s end.
On that Sunday in November 1758, the British commander, General John Forbes, got word that a French and Indian scouting party was approaching Loyalhanna. After he sent a unit of Virginians into the woods, the roar of muskets was loud enough that Forbes sent Washington out with reinforcements. In the dusky light and confusion, each of the two Virginia parties mistook the other for the enemy. The skirmish would come to be known as the “friendly fire incident,” and Washington was largely responsible for restoring order. He placed himself between the two Virginia units, knocking the soldiers’ muskets upward with his sword and commanding them to stop firing. By the time the shooting ceased, as many as 16 Virginians were dead and more than 20 others were wounded. Washington came out unscathed, but in his orderly book, he noted that as his soldiers marched out the next morning, they were to “carry a proportion of spades in order to [bury] the dead.”
Thirteen days later, the British captured Fort Duquesne and, with it, control of the Ohio Valley on Virginia’s western frontier. But Washington remained haunted. In 1787, jotting down his personal reflections for a biographer, the soon-to-be president wrote that his life had never been “in as much jeopardy...before or since” that moment in the Pennsylvania woods. By that time, everybody knew about Washington’s courage during the Revolutionary War. In 1776, he’d led 2,400 men across the Delaware River as sleet rained down and ice floes drifted past in the darkness. But at Loyalhanna, Washington wrote, he’d faced “more imminent danger.”
Yet the friendly fire incident has rarely earned more than a passing glance in the many biographies of Washington. The details and location remained unknown, even as sites all over the United States boasted that Washington slept, dined or worshiped there. Between the shame of fratricide and the urgency of reaching Fort Duquesne, the soldiers themselves spent little time recording or investigating the event. The mass grave of the 16 dead Virginians was never marked or memorialized.