Dared The Dangers

Fort On Mackinac Island

THE SCOT IN AMERICA 

The chain of forts established to protect the frontier from the head of Lake Champlain on the east, to the Mississippi on the west, Ticonderoga, William Henry, Du Quesne, Venango, Detroit, Mackinac, Chicago, and Fort Wayne, was manned by detachments of the Royal Americans, nearly every man of whom was a Scot. It was Colonel Hector Munro, with his Highlanders, who was defeated and his command so ruthlessly slaughtered at the head of the beautiful lake of the Sacrament, Lake George. It was Scotchmen under Scotch officers who banished themselves into the wilderness to give their bodies to the tomahawk, scalping knife and the tortures of the stake, protecting the home of the settler, while at the same time, by years of glorious devotion to the cause of country, leading a life of danger often ending in death by terrible sufferings in the slow tortures of the burning fagot, they blazed the pathway through these western wilds for the onward march of the grandest civilization the world has yet known, or human intelligence has dreamed of.

Let no American, much less Americans of Scottish blood, forget what we owe to that great regiment which stretched out its thin lines by the left flank for a thousand miles into the primeval wilds of a new continent, and dared the dangers, privations and sufferings of the most inhuman warfare the world's history has recorded, to create and defend the highway for the onward, westward march of American civilization; and General Forbes, a Scot, had the fortune to wrest from the French the key to the western gateway, Fort Du Quesne.