Braddock's Road and Three Relative Papers

In 1755, General Edward Braddock led two thousand troops into the Pennsylvania wilderness to seize Fort Duquesne from the French. What happened next reshaped North America. Braddock's Road chronicles this doomed expedition with granular historical precision. The road itself was an audacious undertaking: a 120-mile passage carved through the Allegheny Mountains where no wheeled vehicle had ever traveled. Hulbert examines the military logic, the colonial politics, and the fatal underestimation of Native American warfare tactics that made this campaign a catastrophe. The book traces how British arrogance met French and indigenous resistance in a valley that would become a crucible of imperial conflict. This is military history at its most evocative: the sound of axemen felling trees in primeval forest, the fog of a battlefield where bullets seemed to strike from nowhere, the slow march toward disaster that taught Britain how to fight a new kind of war. Essential reading for anyone drawn to the colonial era, the French and Indian War, or the forgotten arteries of American expansion.