he had been with Braddock—and Thomas Gage—for the disaster on the Monongahela, surviving four bullets through his uniform, another through his hat, and two horses shot dead beneath him, before dragging his mortally wounded commander across the river and riding sixty miles for help in covering the British retreat. That ordeal—more than four hundred British dead, including wounded men scalped or burned alive—gave Washington a tincture of indestructibility while convincing him that “the all-powerful dispensations of Providence” had protected him “beyond all human probability.”
