Abstract
Early in the morning of 28 May 1754 a contingent of more than 40 Virginia militiamen, guided by Iroquois warriors, surprised a party of 35 French soldiers camped in a wooded glen in south-western Pennsylvania. A skirmish ensued in which the French were overpowered and asked for quarter. The French commander, a 35-year-old ensign named Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, was wounded in the fighting. Jumonville explained through an interpreter that he had come as an emissary of Louis XV with a message enjoining the British to withdraw from the Ohio River valley. Jumonville claimed that he had a letter explaining his mission and he asked his translator to read it. During the translation Tanaghrisson, the chief of the Iroquois party, suddenly attacked the French officer, splitting Jumonville’s skull with a hatchet. The Iroquois then washed his hands with Jumonville’s brains. Tanaghrisson’s warriors set upon the other wounded French soldiers, killing and scalping them. Within minutes all but one of the wounded prisoners were killed. The Virginians, under the direction of George Washington, a 22-year-old militia lieutenant-colonel who had experienced combat for the first time minutes earlier, struggled to protect the remaining French prisoners — around 21 in number — from the Iroquois. The Virginians returned to their camp at Great Meadows, Pennsylvania, to await a French response to the killing of Jumonville and his men.
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Cogliano, F.D. (2004). The Sixty Years War in North America, 1754–1815. In: Mortimer, G. (eds) Early Modern Military History, 1450–1815. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523982_10
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