Michael N. McConnell is just the right historian to have written this engaging and well-balanced book on the Forbes Campaign in the Seven Years’ War. Here he joins his expertise in the ethnohistory of the Ohio Country with the “new” military history of the American frontier.1 What emerges is a military, diplomatic, political, and social history in narrative form that at once employs the perspectives, motivations, needs, and demands of Native Americans and Europeans, Iroquois and Delawares, Brits and colonists, regulars and provincials, officers and enlisted men, sutlers and camp followers, women and children, and men and beasts. By necessity, McConnell employs a wide variety of sources, including traditional military reports and returns, the correspondence of Forbes, Bouquet, and Washington, but also the journals of Indian go-betweens such as Christian Frederick Post, and the archaeological data and the physical remains of Forbes’s “walking city” in the form of the artifacts housed today at Fort Ligonier. Coming on the heels of David Preston’s Braddock’s Defeat, McConnell’s detailed and multicultural analysis of Forbes’s campaign makes us hope that somewhere there is an ethnohistorian with expertise in military history looking into General Bradstreet’s New York campaign to take Fort Frontenac.2In military campaigns nothing is ever easy, but to say that Forbes’s campaign was arduous would be an extreme understatement. Forbes stepped into a theater of war defined by three years of his countrymen’s failures, into a colony embroiled in its own war with the Ohio Indians, and into a political nest of stingy, competing colonial governors, governments, imperial agents, and religious and pecuniary interests. He assumed command of an army of British regulars, Royal Americans, Scotch Highlanders, and Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia provincials all perpetually at odds with one another. His argumentative quartermaster, General John St. Clair, was often more trouble than he was worth. Moving supplies through a Pennsylvania war zone depopulated by Ohio Indian raids led to a supply line that was hundreds of miles long, and one that he could never adequately fill with wagons or pack horses. They fought the mountains, the weather, illness and injury, the French and Indians twice to miserable effect, and infamously fired on one another in a blunder which George Washington later remembered “involved the life of G.W. in as much jeopardy as it had ever been before or since” (167).Forbes faced difficult decisions but usually made the right ones: choosing Philadelphia as his depot over Alexandria; demanding that the colonies make peace with the Ohio Indians while courting military assistance from southern Indians; using the Pennsylvania line of forts from Carlisle to Loudon then to Rays Town (Bedford); blazing a road over the Allegheny and Laurel Mountains (through old growth hemlock so hard it split axe heads) instead of taking Braddock’s Road on which the French expected him; and risking it all by launching his army forward to Fort Duquesne in the second half of November. The accumulation of these difficult decisions, with a little luck and the fall of Fort Frontenac, led the French and their Indian allies to abandon Fort Duquesne and the Forks of the Ohio in the face of Forbes’s advance.Decisions both diplomatic and military were difficult for Indians, too. First there was the Cherokees’ and the Catawbas’ quandary, both beset by southern colonists for decades, some of whom in 1758 decided to join a “British and Indian War” in the Ohio country in the quest for immediate gifts and future trade. Most decided to leave Forbes to fight the French alone when he treated their expected “gift” like pay and them as mercenary soldiers when he withheld their promised goods until campaign’s end. For the Ohio Valley Delawares engaged in their own war of independence against Pennsylvania and Virginia, the sight of their Cherokee and Catawba enemies moving with Forbes convinced younger Ohio warriors to believe the French that the British were coming to dispossess them. But senior leaders Tamaqua, Pisquetomen, and even the old warrior “Shingas the Terrible” favored using the Europeans’ war to exact a treaty from the colonies recognizing their territorial claims to the Forks of the Ohio. Forbes understood Braddock’s folly with the Delawares and pressured the colonies to negotiate a peace with the Ohio Indians at Easton, with Forbes’s army only fifty miles from Fort Duquesne. Forbes knew that without that peace, his army stood little chance of taking the Forks.While Indians negotiated their independence and Forbes plotted his strategy, the “walking city” settled in and built the fort at Loyalhannon Creek, later called Fort Ligonier. At nearly 8,000 people it was Pennsylvania’s second largest city in October 1758. About a third were civilians, sutlers, and camp followers who carried the baggage, drove the teams, led the pack horses, sold necessities, washed, mended, and cooked. Some were soldiers’ wives who brought their children, others were servants and slaves of the officers. And then there were the officers’ dogs who even accompanied them on military duty and necessitated a leash order at one critical point. McConnell’s photographs of the artifacts, artillery, and recreated fortifications at Fort Ligonier are key to providing this book with its sense of the army as a living organism, “a giant undulating serpent making its way across mountains, bogs, and meadows” (3). The shoes, wagons, marbles, buckles, and wagons all place human hands and faces on these long-forgotten and unknown men, women, and children.Michael McConnell earlier wrote the definitive account of the Ohio Indians, and now he has written the ultimate account of the Forbes Campaign. Scholars of the Great War for Empire must read this book, and so too should those writing Indian history, and, in doing so, hopefully they will both come to see how important they should be to one another.