Kittanning Expedition

The Kittanning Expedition went by other names as well, the Armstrong Expedition and the Battle of Kittanning among them. This raid took place during the French and Indian War and resulted in the leveling of Kittanning, an American Indian village that Lenape warriors had used as a launching point for strikes against settlers within the British Province of Pennsylvania.

Lieutenant Colonel John Armstrong Sr. led this push into enemy held ground, and it stood as the sole large scale operation mounted by Pennsylvanian provincial troops throughout that harsh frontier conflict. On the morning of September 8, 1756, his men struck the village without warning.

Expedition

On August 31, Armstrong departed Fort Shirley with 300 Pennsylvania provincial troops. The column drew near Kittanning by September 7. Spotting traces of a small Indian encampment, Armstrong sent Lieutenant James Hogg and a dozen men to keep watch over it while the rest pressed onward to the village itself.

At dawn the following day, Armstrong struck the settlement without warning. While most of Kittanning's inhabitants scattered, Captain Jacobs chose to resist, barricading himself inside his house alongside his wife and family. His refusal to yield prompted Lieutenant Robert Callender to set fire to his dwelling and neighboring structures, which ignited stores of gunpowder hidden within. The resulting blasts sent fragments of Indian bodies soaring into the air, some landing in a cornfield nearby. Attempting to flee the flames, Jacobs leapt from his home only to be killed and scalped.

The engagement concluded as fire consumed the whole village. Captives told Armstrong that a group of two dozen men had departed the previous day, part of another raid already underway. Worried this might spell trouble for Hogg's detachment, Armstrong hastily called for a retreat. Several miles into the withdrawal, the party encountered Hogg himself, gravely wounded, who explained that a much larger Indian force had overwhelmed his men. Several had bolted right away, and nearly all the others had perished.

Armstrong and the surviving troops marched onward to Fort Lyttleton to recover, arriving back at Fort Loudoun by September 13. Per his own account, he claimed 11 scalps and the liberation of 11 captives, mostly women and children, while estimating that his men had slain between 30 and 40 Indians. Many white prisoners left behind, among them Marie Le Roy, Barbara Leininger, and Hugh Gibson, were ferried across the Allegheny River by canoe and marched overland into Ohio, where they were absorbed into native communities. A good number of them remained there until Henry Bouquet finally brought them home to Pennsylvania in 1764.

Aftermath

Once the settlement lay in ruins, a number of its former residents came back and built wigwams atop the burned remains of their old dwellings. This reoccupation proved short lived, and during that time two British captives who had tried to flee alongside Armstrong's soldiers met a brutal death by torture. The Indians gathered their corn harvest afterward and traveled to Fort Duquesne, seeking the French governor's consent to relocate even farther westward, putting greater distance between themselves and the colonists. Marie Le Roy and Barbara Leininger recorded that a great many former Kittanning residents settled at Saucunk, Kuskusky, or Muskingum.

The historian Fred Anderson has pointed out that comparable strikes by native peoples against Pennsylvania settlements were typically called "massacres" by colonists, and that the natives themselves viewed this particular raid in the same light. Within Pennsylvania, however, the razing of Kittanning was celebrated as a triumph, and from that point forward Armstrong carried the title "Hero of Kittanning." He and his troops also claimed the bounty that colonial authorities had offered for Captain Jacobs's scalp.

Yet this so called victory came with serious drawbacks. Those who launched the raid lost more men than they managed to kill or wound, and the bulk of the village's population fled successfully, bringing along nearly every prisoner who had been held there. The assault likely made matters worse along the frontier as well, since Indian raids that followed in the autumn grew even more savage than before. What the expedition truly accomplished was exposing to Kittanning's people just how exposed they really were, prompting many to resettle in safer locations.

Out of this upheaval, a movement favoring peace gained momentum, led by Tamaqua, brother of Shingas. Tamaqua would go on to broker peace with Pennsylvania through the Treaty of Easton, an agreement that later allowed General John Forbes to lead a successful British expedition in 1758, ultimately forcing the French to abandon Fort Duquesne.