Episode Details

In the summer of 1755, the largest army ever assembled in North America began cutting a road through the Appalachian wilderness toward a French fort at the Forks of the Ohio — and carried west, in its own order of march, the seeds of its destruction. At its head rode a sixty-year-old British general who had never fought in a forest and could not imagine losing: Edward Braddock, who waved off Benjamin Franklin’s warning about ambush with the words “it is impossible they should make any impression.” Behind him marched a young Virginian named George Washington, on his third journey into this country, serving without rank because a British captain outranked any colonial. And before him stood Shingas, the Delaware king who had once been Britain’s friend — until the general told him, of the land his people had nowhere else to flee from, “No savage should inherit the land.” This is the story of the road to the Monongahela: a war already lit, an empire that would not let its colonies defend themselves, and the fatal contempt that turned the men who knew the woods into the enemy waiting inside them.