From Forts to Families: Following the Army into Western Pennsylvania, 1758–1766
LIKE CINDERELLA, Cathrine Winepilt, Mrs. Middleton, and “Henery’s” wife dropped their slippers and disappeared.1 They were among the colonial British women who stirred embers and ashes in camp and cabin fireplaces; women who had followed troops, traders, and farmers into the wilderness castles that were supposed to mark and defend civilization from savagery, British territory from French and Indian. They may have danced in those North American woodlands, but more often they drudged. That toil supported imperial claims and defense. Yet their contributions, and those of most other civilians with the armed forces engaged in the American campaigns of the Seven Years’ War, were not celebrated in the official accounts that recorded military actions. Letters, journal entries, and orders from Brigadier General John Forbes’s campaign in 1758 through Colonel Henry Bouquet’s command