Around 1787, George Washington sat down to write some notes for a biographer. He was not a man given to self-reflection. But he wanted to correct the record about his experiences three decades earlier during the French and Indian War, when he had led a regiment of Virginia militiamen fighting alongside the British on what was then the rugged western frontier.
It was not all glory. In one passage, Washington recalled the terrible, foggy evening of Nov. 12, 1758. He and his men had ventured from Fort Ligonier, a British redoubt about 60 miles from present-day Pittsburgh, to help another group of Virginians push back a French raiding party but instead ignited a devastating volley of friendly fire.
Several dozen were injured, and as many as 14 killed, before Washington, by his account, rode between the two groups of Virginians, knocking away their muskets.
Washington, who was 26 at the time, had already had several horses shot out from under him, and during the American Revolution would go on to face British fire more than once. But never, he recalled, had his life been “in more imminent danger” than on that evening near Fort Ligonier.
The friendly fire incident, as the episode is known, is a footnote in the history of the French and Indian War, and merits only a paragraph or two in most Washington biographies. But it has long been part of the lore in this part of western Pennsylvania, where a reconstruction of Fort Ligonier opened in 1953.
And now, the fort is announcing some news: the discovery of the spot where it happened.
For the last four summers, archaeologists have been combing a grassy clearing on private land, a few miles from the fort. There, using metal detectors, drones, computer-aided mapping and other cutting-edge technology, they have unearthed hundreds of musket balls, nails, buttons and other 18th-century artifacts, scattered in patterns that match up with, and add detail to, the historical record.
But the team has also drawn on another resource: military veterans.
Jonathan Burns, an archaeologist at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa., started the Veterans Archaeology Program in 2021. The idea was to offer veterans training in professional techniques, but also to learn from their real-life experience.
“We tell them what we know about the site and then ask their perspective,” Burns said. “These folks have been in firefights and understand what it’s like to be isolated in an area where the enemy has the upper hand.”
For some of the four dozen veterans from across the country who have participated, the project also resonates with a core military ethic: Leave no one behind.
“I think instinctively, we always want to clean up the battlefield,” Mark Beckler, an Army helicopter pilot who retired as a colonel after 28 years in the service, including the campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. “It’s important to treat it with respect.”
The First World War?
Most people may not think of western Pennsylvanian as George Washington country. But arrive at the Pittsburgh airport, and by the security line you’ll find a life-size costumed figure of him standing stony faced and ramrod straight, next to Franco Harris of the Pittsburgh Steelers, shown making his famous game-winning “immaculate reception” in the 1972 playoffs.
Still, if you get to Fort Ligonier a little vague on the details — or even the big picture — of the French and Indian War, you’re not alone.
“We get that a lot,” Matthew Gault, the site’s director of education, said with a chuckle during a recent tour of the reconstructed fort, which spills up a hillside a few blocks from the picturesque central square of the town of Ligonier.
It was part of a larger imperial struggle between the French and the British, known as the Seven Years’ War. In Europe, it involved multiple great powers, affecting territories as far away as India and West Africa. In North America, where Native allies fought on both sides, it ended in 1763 with the loss of all of France’s holdings east of the Mississippi.
Winston Churchill called it “the first world war.” And it was one in which a 22-year-old George Washington, according to a recently surfaced account by an Ohio Iroquois warrior, may have fired the first shot.
The friendly fire incident may seem like a minor episode, and Washington himself was not eager to talk about it. The only record he left at the time was a terse entry in his orderly book later that night, noting that he was sending more than 400 men out with spades to bury the dead.
But Gault says that Washington’s 1787 notes — the fort’s museum acquired the original manuscript in 2008 — suggest how much it stayed with him.
“He has just won the American Revolution, and now he’s about to become president of a new nation,” Gault said. “And here he is reflecting on a moment where he made a mistake.”
In 2021, Burns and the newly formed veterans project did some excavations right next to the fort, looking for evidence of a different skirmish. (They found only one 18th-century item: a copper cuff link.) But Mary Manges, Fort Ligonier’s executive director, also dangled another mission: finding the location of the friendly fire incident.
Local lore had long held that it had taken place a few miles out along the Forbes Road, the roughly 200-mile military road that Brig. Gen. John Forbes had ordered hacked through the woods of southern Pennsylvania in an effort to seize Fort Duquesne, the French stronghold at the forks of the Ohio River, now Pittsburgh.
A decade ago, a local teenager had searched the remnants of the Forbes Road with a metal detector and found a significant concentration of artifacts — 124 in all — in only one spot. (The museum is not disclosing the specific location, to protect the owners’ privacy and discourage unauthorized digging.)
There were also old stories handed down about the site, like a warning not to drink out of a spring — a clue, Burns hypothesizes, that in the 1770s, people digging the foundation for a since-deconstructed barn next to it had disturbed a grave.
On their first day of work in 2022, Burns said, his team found a musket ball within an hour. By the end of the day, they had unearthed dozens of artifacts, including a French watch key, 17th-century Swedish coins and various kinds of ammunition.
“We were probably convinced after the first year,” said Scott Shaffer, an archaeologist with the Pennsylvania department of transportation who has volunteered with the project for three years. “This was more than just a few people shooting back and forth.”
A Field is Born
People have been combing battlefields for relics for centuries, if not longer. But in the 20th-century, as the scientific discipline of American historical archaeology took shape, its leading figures were skeptical that the chaotic churn of battle would leave enough behind to draw sound conclusions.
Things began changing in the 1980s, after the archaeologist Douglas Scott used metal detectors — at the time, more associated with amateur treasure hunters — at the site of Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn to map the battle action. That research overturned some long-held notions about the battle (revealing, for example, the extent of Native American use of gunpowder weaponry), while also establishing proof of concept for the field.
Battlefield archaeology (or conflict archaeology, as Burns calls it) involves more than just finding metal in the ground. It also requires collating artifacts with maps, documents and more traditional sources — and, sometimes, overcoming the ingrained skepticism of historians trained in the primacy of the written record.
Scott Stephenson, the president and chief executive of the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, and a historian of the French and Indian War, is among those persuaded by Burns’s claims.
What sealed it, he said, was how Burns, with the help of Ryan Mathur, a geologist at Juniata College, had used isotope analysis to trace the lead in the musket balls to mines in Europe, Quebec and Missouri — the known sources of ammunition for the French and British forces.
“When I heard about that, I said, ‘Oh!” Stephenson said. “That is something that would be very hard to otherwise explain.”
To date, nearly 500 artifacts have been uncovered at the site. But last week, in advance of the public announcement, the veterans, along with students from Juniata College, were still out there, looking for more.
On the first morning, they had cut the long grass at the site — a sloping hill leading to a clearing at the edge of a densely wooded hillside. As most of the crew took a break from the heat, Burns walked a reporter through the signals made by their MineLab Manticore metal detectors — a “grumpy, sad sound” for iron, an “excited sound” for copper and lead.
When you hit something good, he said, “they ring really loud, versus just background trash.”
Down near a clump of trees, Mike Strausner, an Army veteran from Mercersburg, Pa., was swinging his metal detector when it started beeping with R2-D2-ish excitement. He pulled out his serrated spade, started digging and hit — a beer can.
Earlier in the day, Strausner had unearthed a brass button with a basket-weave pattern. It matched one found two summers ago, farther up the hill — two points on a particular soldier’s pathway through the fight?
Strausner had become enchanted with archaeology as a teenager, when a team was excavating at the site of Fort Loudon, another 18th-century fort, about 90 miles southeast of Ligonier.
“Everyday after school, I would ride my bike over to watch,” he said. “After a few days, they put me to work.”
Beckler, who has a degree in strategy from the Army War College, said he was fascinated with piecing together the whole battlefield, which involves thinking about decisions soldiers would have made in the moment 250 years ago.
The artifacts recovered to date, some of which are on view in the museum’s George Washington gallery, include evocative items like a lice comb, parts of a scabbard and that French watch key, found near a stream.
But more important than any particular item is the overall pattern of the scattered artifacts, which helps establish not just the battle lines but how soldiers, and weaponry, had moved across the site.
Shaeffer, the state archaeologist, is an expert on 18th-century musket balls, some 70 of which have been found so far. If they are still round, he said, they indicate where someone had probably stood loading, dropping a few. Dented or pancaked ones had been fired and hit something.
When he wrote his dissertation 40 years ago, Shaeffer had identified 19 variables on a musket ball to consider. Now, he’s up to 62 — “and that’s before you start talking about residual blood,” he said.
Burns said he had done the isotope analysis, which determined where the lead in the musket balls had come from, as a way of pushing things over the high bar of proof demanded by historians. “That was a slam-dunk,” he said.
But it also takes the story beyond the minutiae of this particular battlefield, he said, to the bigger picture of how supply chains operated across 18th-century North America.
Looking for the Fallen
In addition to analyzing metal, the team is also working on another mystery: Where were the fallen buried?
In 2023, Burns said, two K9 dogs trained in locating human remains, working separately, hit the same seven or so spots. “Essence of human,” Burns said, can linger even after centuries or even thousands of years.
Given the highly acidic soil of the region, he said, the bodies would have long since dissolved. The only artifacts you might find, Burns said, were dense bones or teeth, or maybe buttons and clothing fasteners.
If the team found a confirmed burial pit, he said, they would probably leave it as it was. But they hope to be able to erect some kind of memorial. “This is hallowed ground,” he said.
Beckler, the combat veteran, said the friendly fire incident held lessons for current commanders and everyday soldiers alike. “Our most famous general and founding father, this guy we attribute so much to — it even happened to him,” he said.
Jennifer Schuessler is a reporter for the Culture section of The Times who covers intellectual life and the world of ideas.
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