John Forbes(1707–1759)

John Forbes was born on 5 September 1707 at Pittencrieff near Dunfermline in Fife, into a family of the Forbes name long settled in Scotland. He trained at first for medicine, which gave him an orderly and practical cast of mind, before buying a commission in the Scots Greys in 1735 and turning soldier. He served through the European campaigns of the War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740s, chiefly as a staff and quartermaster officer, the demanding and unglamorous work of moving and feeding armies, and built a reputation as one of the most capable administrative soldiers in the British service.

In 1757, during the war with France that was being fought out across North America as much as in Europe, he was sent to America and given the local rank of brigadier-general. His task for the following year was one that had already destroyed one British army: the capture of Fort Duquesne, the French strongpoint at the forks of the Ohio, where the Allegheny and the Monongahela meet, the key to the whole Ohio country. Three years earlier General Braddock had marched on the same fort and been ambushed and annihilated within a few miles of it. Forbes meant to do it differently.

He chose to cut a new road westward straight across the mountains of Pennsylvania rather than follow Braddock's fatal track, and he advanced along it slowly and methodically, building a chain of fortified supply posts as he went so that his army could never be cut off from its provisions as Braddock's had been. The pace frustrated his subordinates, among them a young Virginian colonel named George Washington who favoured the southern route, but Forbes held to his plan. At the same time he worked patiently to detach the local native nations from their French alliance through the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Easton, so that by the autumn the French at the forks found themselves stripped of their native allies and at the end of a long and threatened supply line.

He did all of this while mortally ill. He suffered from a wasting disease, probably of the bowel, that grew steadily worse through the campaign, and for much of the advance he could not sit a horse and was carried forward on a litter slung between two horses, directing the army from his sickbed. By late November 1758 his road had reached the forks. The French, outnumbered, cut off and abandoned by their allies, blew up Fort Duquesne and withdrew rather than stand a siege, and Forbes's troops occupied the smoking ruins on 25 November 1758 without a battle. He ordered a new British fort built on the spot and named the place Pittsburgh, in honour of William Pitt, the minister whose war it was.

The forks of the Ohio were now British, and with them the gateway to the whole interior of the continent, won by foresight and logistics rather than by the bloodletting that had failed before. The effort had used up the last of his strength. He was carried back across his own road to Philadelphia and died there on 11 March 1759, a few months after his victory, and was buried in the chancel of Christ Church. The Forbes name carries his memory as the dying Fife brigadier who took the most important position in North America by building a road and keeping his head, and left his campaign written permanently on the map in the name of Pittsburgh.