Since the 18th century, historians have credited General John Forbes’s success in seizing Fort Duquesne principally to the deliberation and care he took in building the road and forts that constituted his “covered approach” to the Forks of Ohio.  Modern scholars have added to the picture by emphasizing the decisive effects of intercultural diplomacy that paralleled Forbes’s fort-and-road-building and culminated in the separate peace that the Delawares negotiated with the British at the Treaty of Easton. But what made the Delawares, and eventually the Shawnees, abandon their alliance with the French, thus rendering the Forks of Ohio indefensible?

Author Fred Anderson’s account of the history of Native groups at the Forks from 1755 through the fall of Fort Duquesne—until quite recently, a hidden history—casts new light on this turning point of the Seven Years’ War, and hints at larger patterns of Indian influence in the shaping of American history.