Batman

We are reviewing 1758 in this year of 2022, and we are following the Forbes Expedition at this time. Lt Col Henry Bouquet is mostly on the front. General Forbes is mostly to the back, handling the logistics of supplying an army, moving it, building supply depots and forts, building roads through the forest.

One group who helped were the Bat men.

"Because of the problems with the wagons, Bouquet proposed the use of pack horses to alternately replace or augment them. The use of pack horses was routine in the British Army. "

"Such horses

were formally referred to as

"bat horses"

from the French "cheval de bat"

which literally means "horses of baggage,"

a "bat" being a pack saddle. "

"In the British Army of the Seven Years War their use was authorized by officers to transport their personal gear, and officers were provided with an allowance to pay for bat horses when on campaign. "

"Certainly it was no great leap of logic to realize that bat horses could also be used to transport the equipment and supplies of the army, and Bouquet may have seen them used or actually employed them in his previous military operations in the mountains of Italy."

page 64

The British Defeat of the French in Pennsylvania, 1758: A Military History of the Forbes Campaign Against Fort Duquesne: by Douglas R. Cubbison. More on this author here. And a review here.

Colonel George Washington ran into difficulty with Lt Gov Dinwiddie about batman. GW needed to pay them and wanted subsidy for this service from the Virginia government.

We will document later the dates and times of those funding difficulties for Colonel George Washington's Bat men.

Compiled and authored by Jim Moyer 10/9/2022

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