Battle of Fort Duquesne was a Colonial and Pre-Columbian engagement fought in Pennsylvania, 1758. It was a French victory.
On 14 September 1758, amid the French and Indian War, British troops moved against Fort Duquesne, a stronghold held by the French that would eventually become the ground on which Pittsburgh was built. François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery, commanding the French alongside their native allies, outmaneuvered the attacking force, encircled it, and inflicted heavy losses that left it largely destroyed.
In July 1758, British forces put together an ambitious campaign meant to push the French from the disputed Ohio Country, the upper reaches of the Ohio River Valley, and open a path toward Canada. General John Forbes commanded the effort, which numbered 6,000 men and counted among its ranks a group of Virginians under George Washington.
The march began with the building of a road, punctuated by forts and redoubts raised at intervals of roughly forty miles. Progress came slowly. Forbes himself, weakened by serious illness, could not stay at the front of his own force and handed control to his subordinate, Lt. Col. Henry Bouquet, a Swiss-born officer at the head of a Royal American Regiment battalion. When the army drew near Fort Duquesne toward the end of August, Bouquet gave Major James Grant of Ballindalloch, of the 77th Regiment, permission to scout the surrounding country with a detachment of 850 men.
Grant himself fell into enemy hands, and what remained of his command straggled back toward Fort Ligonier in disarray.
The French had succeeded in repelling that first assault, yet Lignery knew his roughly 600 men stood no chance of defending Fort Duquesne once the main British army arrived, outnumbering them by more than tenfold. Adding to the French difficulty, several native allies abandoned the cause. On November 24, Lignery's men detonated their powder stores, set the fort ablaze, and slipped away under cover of night. When British troops reached the still-burning ruins, a gruesome scene awaited them: Indians had cut the heads from numerous fallen Highlanders and mounted them atop the fort's sharpened palisades, with the men's kilts arranged beneath in grim display. Afterward, British and American forces reconstructed the fort on the same ground, renaming it Fort Pitt in honor of William Pitt, the British prime minister who had directed that the position be seized.
In 1901, a plaque was placed on the Allegheny County Courthouse to mark where the fighting occurred, and the rise on which it took place now bears the name Grant Street, located in Pittsburgh.
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