It was the eighteenth of June before the army reached a place called the Little Meadows, less than thirty miles from Fort Cumberland.  Fever and dysentery among the men, and the weakness and worthlessness of many of the horses, joined to the extreme difficulty of the road, so retarded them that they could move scarcely more than three miles a day.  Braddock consulted with Washington, who advised him to leave the heavy baggage to follow as it could, and push forward with a body of chosen troops.  This counsel was given in view of a report that five hundred regulars were on the way to reinforce Fort Duquesne.  It was adopted.  Colonel Dunbar was left to command the rear division, whose powers of movement were now reduced to the lowest point.  The advance corps, consisting of about twelve hundred soldiers, besides officers and drivers, began its march on the nineteenth with such artillery as was thought indispensable, thirty wagons, and a large number of packhorses.  “The prospect,” writes Washington to his brother, “conveyed infinite delight to my mind, though I was excessively ill at the time.  But this prospect was soon clouded, and my hopes brought very low indeed when I found that, instead of pushing on with vigor without regarding a little rough road, they were halting to level every mole-hill, and to erect bridges over every brook, by which means we were four days in getting twelve miles.”  It was not till the seventh of July that they neared the mouth of Turtle Creek, a stream entering the Monongahela about eight miles from the French fort.  The way was direct and short, but would lead them through a difficult country and a defile so perilous that Braddock resolved to ford the Monongahela to avoid this danger, and then ford it again to reach his destination.

Fort Duquesne stood on the point of land where the Alleghany and the Monongahela join to form the Ohio, and where now stands Pittsburg, with its swarming population, its restless industries, the clang of its forges, and its chimneys vomiting foul smoke into the face of heaven.  At that early day a white flag fluttering over a cluster of palisades and embankments betokened the first intrusion of civilized men upon a scene which, a few months before, breathed the repose of a virgin wilderness, voiceless but for the lapping of waves upon the pebbles, or the note of some lonely bird.  But now the sleep of ages was broken, and bugle and drum told the astonished forest that its doom was pronounced and its days numbered.  The fort was a compact little work, solidly built and strong, compared with others on the continent.  It was a square of four bastions, with the water close on two sides, and the other two protected by ravelins, ditch, glacis, and covered way.  The ramparts on these sides were of squared logs, filled in with earth, and ten feet or more thick.  The two water sides were enclosed by a massive stockade of upright logs, twelve feet high, mortised together and loopholed.