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136 Capture of Frontenac and Fort Duquesne. [1753-9 officer. He had with him some 4000 provincials from the middle and southern colonies and 1600 regulars, chiefly Highlanders. Before setting out, his powers of organisation and diplomacy were heavily taxed, as in order to get his men and supplies he had to wrestle long and painfully with the perverse legislatures of Pennsylvania and her neighbours, who were very far indeed from emulating the zeal of New England. He finally started, not upon Braddock's tracks, but, in the teeth of Virginian opinion, upon a new route to be laboriously opened step by step through the west of Pennsylvania. An able Swiss officer, Bouquet, was his second in command, while Washington, though opposed to the route, lent active assistance. Forbes' health was utterly broken, but, borne on a hurdle between two horses, he stuck to his post with admirable courage. The strength of Fort Duquesne was quite unknown, so Grant, a Highland officer, with 500 of his own men and some rangers, went forward to investigate it. His zeal outrunning his discretion, he found himself, greatly outnumbered, in front of the enemy, and suffered a repetition of Braddock's catastrophe on a less serious scale, not far from the spot where the bones of the victims of 1755, picked clean by wolves, were still whitening by the Monongahela. But British confidence could no longer be so readily shaken. Forbes pressed cautiously but steadily on through scalping Indians and French guerillas, securing the posts behind him as his axemen hewed their laborious way across the Alleghanies. The leaves were falling from the forest trees under the chill breath of November, and the task was not yet done. .His officers urged sound and logical reasons for deferring the attack till spring. Forbes, however, swinging in his rude litter and in mortal pain, but, with prescience perhaps in his dying eyes, refused to listen, and with Bouquet, Washington and 2500 picked men pushed on to this hornets 1 nest of French and Indian devilry. Their nerves strung up in expecta- tion of a fierce and critical encounter, Forbes and his men were amazed to find the place dismantled and forsaken, and stacks of fire-scorched chimneys rising out of a heap of charred ruins with the unburied bodies of Grant's Highlanders lying round. The capture of Louisbourg and above all the destruction of Frontenac, a source of supply to the Ohio posts, had helped, in the face of Forbes' advance, to render Duquesne untenable. TTie French had vanished for ever from the Ohio. Their dream of western empire was at an end, and they had now to fight for their very existence in America. Forbes in the meantime went slowly back through the cold and sleet to die in Philadelphia, where some unrecorded grave holds the bones of a hero, whose momentous services received scant notice from his countrymen and whose very name has no longer any place in their memory. The year 1759 was to be an even busier, and for the English a more triumphant one, than its predecessor. And it was to be made ever memorable by the capture of Quebec in the face of natural difficulties