Around 1787, George Washington sat down to write some notes for a biographer. He was not a man given to self-reflection. But he wanted to correct the record about his experiences three decades earlier during the French and Indian War, when he had led a regiment of Virginia militiamen fighting alongside the British on what was then the rugged western frontier.

It was not all glory. In one passage, Washington recalled the terrible, foggy evening of Nov. 12, 1758. He and his men had ventured from Fort Ligonier, a British redoubt about 60 miles from present-day Pittsburgh, to help another group of Virginians push back a French raiding party but instead ignited a devastating volley of friendly fire.

Several dozen were injured, and as many as 14 killed, before Washington, by his account, rode between the two groups of Virginians, knocking away their muskets.

Washington, who was 26 at the time, had already had several horses shot out from under him, and during the American Revolution would go on to face British fire more than once. But never, he recalled, had his life been “in more imminent danger” than on that evening near Fort Ligonier.

The friendly fire incident, as the episode is known, is a footnote in the history of the French and Indian War, and merits only a paragraph or two in most Washington biographies. But it has long been part of the lore in this part of western Pennsylvania, where a reconstruction of Fort Ligonier opened in 1953.