Clan Ferguson

On the afternoon of the eleventh of September 1777, on the wooded high ground above Brandywine Creek in Pennsylvania, in the opening hours of the battle that would clear the way for the British capture of Philadelphia, Captain Patrick Ferguson of the 70th Regiment of Foot, twenty-three years old, son of Lord Pitfour of the Court of Session in Edinburgh, the inventor of the breech-loading flintlock rifle that bore his name (the first practical breech-loader adopted by any European army, in his own experimental company of one hundred riflemen present on the field), saw two American officers ride past him at about a hundred yards. One was a tall man in a French-pattern hussar hat who was, by Ferguson's own letter to Lord Pitfour written four days later, probably an officer of high rank; the other was a younger officer in continental blue. Ferguson, in cover with his rifle drawn, had a clear shot. He chose not to take it. The two men rode on. The next morning, in the field hospital after a musket-ball had broken his right elbow at the second action of the day, Ferguson was told by a wounded American officer that the tall man on the bay horse had been Commander-in-Chief George Washington and his French aide the Count Casimir Pulaski. Ferguson, by his own letter, did not regret the choice. I could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him, he wrote to his father, but it was not pleasant to fire at the back of an unoffending individual, who was acquitting himself very coolly of his duty, so I let him alone.

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