The Outposts

by John L. Moore

When the American Revolution began in 1775, neither the British nor the Americans wanted to involve the native tribes. “This is a family quarrel between us and Old England,” the U.S. Congress told the Iroquois Confederacy. “You Indians are not concerned in it.”

The Indians didn’t want to take sides. “We will not suffer either the English or Americans to march an army through our country,” Guyasuta, the ranking Iroquois chief in the Ohio River Valley, declared at Pittsburgh in 1776.

The natives’ neutrality didn’t last another year.

“The western Indians are united against us,” Brigadier General Edward Hand said in September 1777. The Outposts tells how Hand led a mostly militia force from Fort Pitt into Indian Country in February 1778. When his troops met friendly Delawares in the woods, they “were so impetuous that I could not prevent their killing the man and one of the women,” he said.

John L. Moore’s nonfiction book draws on first-person accounts to chronicle these events.

Late 1778 saw the Americans erect two forts–Fort McIntosh at present-day Beaver, Pa., and Fort Laurens at Bolivar, Ohio–along a key trail linking Fort Pitt and Fort Detroit, 300 miles to the northwest. The construction was ordered by General Lachlan McIntosh, a Georgian who didn’t appreciate the severity of northern winters.

Delaware Indians, still friendly toward the United States, welcomed Fort Laurens, but the British and their native allies realized the outpost would support an American march against Detroit. When hostile warriors prevented McIntosh from shipping provisions to the fort, soldiers in the garrison began to starve. Hungry soldiers “washed their moccasins and broiled them for food, and broiled strips of old dried hides,” an elderly veteran recalled decades later.

112 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 6, 2022

About the author

I was born to woman in 1952 and born into the Kingdom in June of 1973 after years of looking for God in drugs, eastern religions, the occult and martial arts. In 1975 I was Baptized in the Holy Spirit in a profound and powerful way. In 1985 I was healed of a life-threatening liver disease. Since 1982, Debra and I have been involved in home church ministry and training people to hear from God and speak what they hear. We have been blessed to be influenced by some wonderful men and women of God, most of them can be found on our "Links" page.

We are the parents of two wonderful children and their wonderful spouses: Jess, and his wife, Kami; and Andrea, her husband, Rob Ferguson. They've given us five beautiful grandchildren: Creed, Selah Ann, Ryann, David, and Autumn.

My statement of beliefs can be summed up like this: Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The Baptism in the Spirit empowers the Believer. Inner Healing and Deliverance is part of every believer's need for sanctification. Hearing from God and moving in the Gifts of the Spirit are vital. God is restoring David's Tabernacle and the Five-Fold Ministries of Ephesians 4:11. Those offices are about functions, not titles. Prophetic ministry is more about forth-telling the heart of God than it is fore-telling the future. If you don't know his heart He won't tell you the future. We could all read the Bible and pray more. Jesus is coming back. I don't know when. I do know He is coming back on a horse, so I don't think He minds if we raise good horses. Until He returns, we are dedicated to doing the work of the Kingdom everywhere, and especially in the marketplace. Happiness is realizing He must increase but we must decrease. Decreasing does not mean a loss of personal identity, instead it is the discovery of one's real identity. Young people can move as powerfully in the Spirit as adults, in fact, in many cases, they do it much better because their mind doesn't get in the way.

That's about it.