English had only run into a trap. They could go neither upstream nor
down, and when winter came their ships would be frozen in the ice and
become an easy prey. So the French general refused to risk an attack. He
decided to play a waiting game and let time and nature fight for France.
On the day when Wolfe’s fleet arrived, a violent storm came up, and
several British ships and floats were dashed on the rocks and badly
damaged. After that, Montcalm sent out burning ships to set fire to the
English fleet and destroy it. But Wolfe’s men bravely towed the French
fire-ships out of the way, and the only men lost were the Canadian
captain in charge of the fire-ships and six of his sailors, who were
burned to death.
Next Wolfe tried to enter the country on the Quebec side of the river,
near the Falls of Montmorency, where the water falls two hundred and
fifty feet over high cliffs. These falls are so beautiful that some of
the English risked being shot by the Canadians in order to see them. The
region between the Falls of Montmorency and Quebec was so well guarded
by French and Canadians that Montcalm was sure the English could never
get behind Quebec. He sent word to the British general: “You will, no
doubt, demolish the town, but you shall never get inside of it.” Wolfe
answered back: “I will have Quebec if I stay here till the end of
November.” But every English attack failed, and even the brave young
commander became discouraged. He had never known good health, and he
was now quite ill.
When he was urged to attack the English general and capture or drive him
back, Montcalm said with a smile, “Let him amuse himself where he is. If
we drive him off he may go to some place where he can do us harm.”
But the French made another attempt to set fire to the British fleet
with seventy rafts, small boats, and schooners. Again they failed, and
the French themselves explained that this was due only to the courage of
the English sailors, who swarmed out in little boats to fight the fire
before it could do any harm to their fleet.
In August General Wolfe was ill in bed, and it was reported in the
British army that he was not likely to live long. But even while he was
so ill, the young commander’s one thought was the capture of Quebec. On
the last day of August he said to his physician that he now had a plan
to carry out if he could only live to lead his army in person. “I know
too well that you cannot cure me,” he continued, “but pray make me so
that I may be without pain for a few days, and able to do my duty. That
is all I want.”
In his letter to his mother that day he wrote:
“The enemy puts nothing to risk, and I can’t in conscience put the
whole army to risk. He has wisely shut himself up so that I can’t
get at him without spilling a torrent of blood, and that perhaps to
little or no purpose. The Marquis de Montcalm is at the head of a
great number of bad soldiers, and I am at the head of a small
number of good ones that wish for nothing so much as to fight him,
but the wary old fellow avoids an action.”
Early in September Wolfe seemed himself again, though he realized that
he had only a few days to live. The French saw the British fleet pass
their fort on the way up the river at night, although the cannon of the
fort belched lightnings and bellowed thunder at them. Montcalm wondered
what the English were going to try to do, after all. “They mean to land
somewhere,” he said.
Wolfe did “mean to land somewhere,” and that somewhere was the very
place Montcalm did not dream of, a steep cliff back of the town. When
any one spoke of the danger of the capture of Quebec, the French general
would shrug and smile and say, “But the English cannot fly!”
One night when it was very dark, sixteen hundred British soldiers came
floating down the river in their ships’ boats till they came opposite
the town. Wolfe was with them in person, as he had hoped and prayed to
be. As they were slowly floating, the young commander repeated the
familiar lines by Gray,
“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour--
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
“I would rather have written those lines,” he said with deep feeling,
“than take Quebec to-morrow!”
As their boats stole in to the shore, a sentinel called out in French,
“Who goes there?”
“France,” answered a voice in French.
“What regiment?”
“The Queen’s,” again in good French, by a Scotchman who had seen service
in France.
A little later another sentryman challenged them.
“What is that?”
The Scotchman whispered, “Provision boats. _Sh!_ the English will hear
us!”
In this way they reached a point at the foot of the steep cliff.
Twenty-four men started to climb up where it seemed impossible. As they
kept on, others started up after them. Then came others, General Wolfe
among the number. In a short time quite a large company, in red coats
and Scotch kilts, had reached the top and dragged several small cannon
after them. The French felt so safe from attack that the small guard on
the Plains of Abraham, as the level top was called, was taken by
surprise and easily overcome.
[Illustration: THE DEATH OF GENERAL WOLFE ON THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM.
_From the painting by Alonzo Chappel_]
An alarm spread. A Frenchman on horseback came dashing over to
Montcalm’s headquarters, gasping: “The English--on the Plains of
Abraham!”
There was a great fight on top of that cliff. Wolfe was seen
here--there--everywhere! But before the British drove the French back,
the young general had fallen--shot three times.
“Shall I go for a surgeon?” asked an Englishman.
“There’s no need,” Wolfe whispered. “It’s all over with me.”
A little later a man shouted, “See how they run!”
“Who run?” repeated Wolfe, opening his eyes.
“The enemy, sir. They are giving way everywhere!”
Wolfe roused up long enough to send a brief order to the next in
command, telling him just how to go ahead and capture the fort. Then he
lay down wearily, smiling as he closed his eyes. “Now God be praised, I
shall die in peace,” he said.
The French hero of Quebec also was shot through the body in that last
short fight. “How long have I to live?” he asked.
“Not more than twelve hours,” said the surgeon in charge.
“So much the better,” said the dying Montcalm. “I am happy that I shall
not live to see the surrender of Quebec.”
DANIEL BOONE, THE GREAT INDIAN FIGHTER OF KENTUCKY
Of all the great American hunters, trappers, and Indian fighters, Daniel
Boone was the leader. He was born in Pennsylvania, but while still a boy
he moved with his parents to North Carolina. Besides learning to do farm
work and help his father at the loom and the forge, the
[Illustration: DANIEL BOONE, THE GREAT INDIAN FIGHTER OF KENTUCKY.
_From the painting by Chappel_]
Boone boy found time for trapping, hunting, and learning the arts of a
woodsman. Father Boone, though of Quaker descent, encouraged this son to
go hunting and to learn the woodcraft of the Indians. When the lad was
twelve his heart was delighted by the gift of a light rifle from his
sensible father.
Of course, Daniel did not have much chance to go to school, but he
acquired mathematics enough to fit him for the business of backwoods
life and to make him a fair land surveyor. But he never had the gift of
spelling. For many years a giant beech-tree was pointed out where he had
had a bear-fight; it was a kind of monument to Daniel’s poor spelling.
In the bark, high on its trunk, he had cut these crooked letters: “D.
Boon cilled a bar on this tree in the year 1760.” Yet, although he did
not spell even his own name correctly, Daniel Boone was the best
educated of all the pioneers, for he had just the kind of knowledge that
his country needed most at that time.
When Daniel was twenty-one a call came to North Carolina for men to help
the soldiers of General Braddock, who had been sent by the king of
England to fight the French and Indians. The English wished to keep
control of the country north and south of the Ohio River. Young Boone
volunteered and was in the battle of Fort Duquesne, when Braddock was
defeated and killed, and when young Major George Washington led the
colonial troops, who fought Indian fashion and saved a small part of
Braddock’s army from being killed and scalped. This fight proved a
turning point in the life of the North Carolina soldier, for he met in
the ranks a scout named John Finley, who had been on a hunting trip in
the wild country south of the Ohio. Finley drew a picture of this wild
region that warmed the heart of Daniel Boone. One of the chief beauties
there for the born hunter was that the Indians did not inhabit the
country. They only went back and forth across it, so that they did not
kill or scare away the game.
Daniel went home to North Carolina and married a beautiful girl of
seventeen, and they kept house in a cabin the young husband had built
with his own hands. He lived there several years with his wife and
little boy, near his father’s family. But he was restless, going on
hunting trips farther and farther from home, until he had followed the
game over the mountains into the region of the Tennessee River.
The friend of the French and Indian War, John Finley, came to visit the
Boones one fall, and they made him stay all that winter. “The call of
the wild” was too strong to let Boone stay at home long after that. In
the spring he and Finley, with four other men, on six horses, with
bedding and a small cooking outfit on six packhorses, started off, early
one bright morning, on their wonderful shooting and trapping trip. They
were armed with hunting-knives, tomahawks and their trusty rifles.
When they had crossed the mountains they hunted the bear, buffalo, elk,
and deer, and trapped little fur animals with such success that they
soon had quite a fortune in furs. As they prepared to start east with
these, a band of Indians appeared on the scene, broke up their little
camp, and captured everything they had. The savages spared the white
men’s lives; but they made signs that they would kill them all if they
found them there again, and they took Boone and another man prisoners.
The rest of the party, badly frightened, took up their weary march for
home, empty-handed. Boone, and his companion, when they escaped, only
went far enough to make the Indians think they also were afraid; then
they came back and hunted alone in all that wild region.
After long, lonely months, Boone’s brother came and brought gunpowder
and supplies, and the Boones hunted and trapped there two years longer.
They started home with a rich store of furs, but some Indians came along
and robbed them again. The red men afterward killed the brother, but
Daniel, after hairbreadth escapes, reached North Carolina, safe and
sound, but poorer than when he went away.
Still, Daniel Boone was rich in wood lore and Indian craft. He gave such
attractive accounts of the beautiful country and the chances to get rich
quickly that quite a number of heroic people were persuaded to go back
with him and settle in the land. He started over the mountains again
with ten in his own family, besides neighbors and friends. No one could
have followed the way but a cunning scout like Daniel Boone, to whom
every leaf, every sound, every mark in the earth had its own secret
message. During the journey the party were attacked by Indians, and
Boone’s eldest son, a lad of seventeen, was killed.
This experience discouraged the others and they tried to induce their
leader to go back with them. He sturdily refused, saying, “There are
nearly a hundred of us. We can beat the Indians yet.” Nevertheless, it
seemed wiser to wait awhile before pushing on across the mountains; so
they went back a little way and settled for a year or two on a little
mountain river.
By this time many people in the Carolinas and Virginia had heard about
the Promised Land of Daniel Boone. He was engaged to mark the way or
“blaze the trail” through to Kentucky. This trail was afterwards
traveled so much that it was called the Wilderness Road. Taking thirty
men with him, Boone once more set out on the way to settle Kentucky.
They came to a halt in the heart of that country, and built a stockade
on the Kentucky River. This enclosure, a little longer than a square,
with a fort at each of the four corners and eight smaller cabins in the
space inside, was surrounded by a high fence of sharpened logs standing
upright. To this strong stockade the rest of the party gave the name of
Boonesboro, in honor of the Kentucky pioneer. Later, Boone returned for
his family and brought them to their new home.
Many and exciting were the adventures of the settlers. One afternoon two
girls went out canoeing on the river with the daughter of Daniel Boone.
When the three girls had passed a bend in the river and were too far
away for their shrieks to be heard at the fort, a fierce-looking Indian
sprang out from the bushes on the farther bank and pulled in their
canoe. Other savages stifled the girls’ cries and plunged with them into
the darkening forest.
Before long the absent ones were missed and the alarm was given. The
empty canoe was found, and a search party was formed, led by the fathers
of the missing girls. The hunt lasted two days and two nights. On the
morning of the third day the anxious fathers saw smoke rising from an
Indian camp. As the camp was over fifty miles from Boonesboro, the
savages had become careless. Boone and two other men crept up near the
camp and shot the two Indians guarding their three white captives. The
other red men jumped and ran for the woods. The happy fathers and their
friends returned to their anxious families at Boonesboro with the
daughters unhurt.
While Washington and his little armies were waging the War for
Independence along the eastern coast, Daniel Boone and his pioneers were
fighting just as bravely for their country. Though they did not realize
it then, the Backwoods Territory formed by far the greater part of the
future United States. Boone was the leader who remained on guard while
others did the things which are oftener described in the history of the
country. He helped the pioneers with his advice, and defended the
families of the men who went out and fought in the historic battles.
One reason why the Indians feared and revered this “White Chief” was
that Daniel Boone, as if by magic, had often escaped death at their
hands. But once his good fortune seemed to fail him. Near Boonesboro was
a salt “lick,” or a spring of salt water, where salt was left spread
around the spring like frost or a white powder on the ground. Deer,
buffalo, and other animals often came there to lick up the salt, and
pioneers often hid near by and shot them. Boone and thirty men had come
from the fort to gather a supply of salt to have on hand in case they
should be attacked by Indians. Boone and his men were surrounded and
captured; and, as this was during the War for Independence, they were
taken to Detroit to be dealt with by the British Governor Hamilton. On
the way through deep snows and zero weather they were all in danger of
starving. At a solemn council some of the Indians proposed to get rid of
their prisoners by torturing and burning them to death. There were one
hundred and twenty of the savages, and the vote stood fifty-nine for the
killing to sixty-one against. There was no doubt that the Indians’
regard for Daniel Boone saved the lives of all those white men. Though
this seemed to have been done by a single vote, it was a strange thing
that sixty-one hostile savages were willing to keep alive and feed their
prisoners at the risk of starving themselves.
At Detroit, Hamilton offered the Indians five hundred dollars if they
would let Daniel Boone go free, as he wanted to use him as a British
scout. The savages refused and took him to their chief village in the
Ohio country. Boone knew their language, but he pretended not to
understand a word they said among themselves. He seemed to be very fond
of their mode of life and acted pleased when they told him they were
going to make him a chief. He won their good will by not wincing when
they tortured him to see if he could prove himself worthy of that great
honor.
The white chief was the best marksman in all the tribe. When they let
him go off hunting by himself they counted the bullets and measured the
gunpowder they gave him. But he cut the bullets in two and used very
small charges of powder, thus saving nearly half to use when he should
find a chance to escape. Hearing the others talking of an attack they
were going to make on Boonesboro, he slipped away one morning while out
hunting, when he would not be missed till night. Not daring to shoot
game for food, nor wishing to waste time to dress and cook it, he was
nearly starved when he reached the Kentucky fort, after going one
hundred and sixty miles through a region full of hostile tribes.
The Indians must have wasted many days searching for him, as it was six
weeks before his adopted tribe and other savages arrived at Boonesboro.
Daniel Boone held the fort for ten days, with fifty white men and boys
and twenty-five women and children, against four hundred and fifty red
men. Several times the Indians set fire to the fort, but the brave
white men put out the fire at great risk to their lives. The Indians
tried to tunnel under the log fence, but the cunning white chief met and
beat them back at every point. At last the savages gave up the fight and
slunk away.
Now that so many settlers had moved to Kentucky, the old hero found that
country too crowded to suit him, so he and his family moved to a wilder
region on the Missouri River, “to find elbow room,” he said. After
hundreds of thrilling adventures and narrow escapes, the Indian hunter
died in bed, with his wife and three of his children around him. A
friend who was near him in his latter days said of Daniel Boone: “Never
was old age more green nor gray hairs more graceful.”
GEORGE ROGERS CLARK, THE YOUNG HERO WITH A GREAT IDEA
Soon after the beginning of the War for Independence, George Rogers
Clark, a tall, broad-shouldered, red-haired, blue-eyed young man of
twenty-four, left his home in Virginia and went over the mountains to
join the settlers in Kentucky. He had already had some adventures in the
wilderness along the Ohio River, hunting wild game and fighting wilder
Indians. Not long after Clark’s arrival, the pioneers joined together
and sent him and another man back to Virginia to see if they could have
Kentucky adopted as a county of that state. Virginia had just been
declared one of the thirteen United States. Clark and his companion were
also to try to get the legislature to grant them money enough to buy
gunpowder, which was now the greatest need of the Kentucky settlers in
fighting the Indians.
When the two young delegates, in coonskin caps and leather leggings,
arrived at the Virginia capital they found to their dismay that the
legislators of the new state had just adjourned and gone home. Patrick
Henry, the fiery orator who had shouted in that very capitol building,
“Give me liberty or give me death!” was now governor of Virginia. The
young men from Kentucky went and told him they must not go back without
that powder; so Governor Henry got them five hundred pounds, and
arranged to make it all right when the State legislature should meet
again. Clark succeeded also in having Kentucky made a county of
Virginia.
[Illustration: COLONEL GEORGE ROGERS CLARK.]
While the battles of the Revolution were being fought along the Atlantic
coast, there was a terrible state of affairs in the great valley of the
Ohio. Henry Hamilton, the British governor at Detroit, then in charge
of the forts and trading posts on the Wabash and Mississippi rivers, was
doing one thing that made the settlers’ blood boil wherever they heard
of it. He had hired all the Indians he could to fight on the British
side by furnishing them with scalping-knives and paying them a bounty,
or money prize, on every scalp they brought in to prove that they had
killed an American man, woman, or child. The savages went everywhere on
the warpath, murdering as many people as they could to earn as much
bounty money as possible.
In the midst of this horrible warfare a bright idea came to George
Rogers Clark, but he kept it to himself. He sent two men across the Ohio
and up the Mississippi and Wabash rivers to see what was going on at the
British trading-posts there. The word they brought back made the young
man start at once for Virginia--this time alone. He called again on
Governor Patrick Henry and on his old neighbor, Thomas Jefferson. Both
of those great patriots approved his plan and charged him on no account
to let it leak out before he was ready to act, for fear some wily Indian
or dishonest Frenchman might give warning and spoil it all.
When George Rogers Clark started again from Virginia he wore the badge
of a colonel in the Continental army; and he had the promised support of
the state. He went west by way of the Ohio River as far as what is now
Louisville. The settlement he started there owes its name to the news
which Clark heard from some men who joined him there; that the king and
the people of France had pledged money, men, and ships to help the
United States in the War for Independence. The new town was named in
honor of the French king.
The first thing the young commander had to do was to raise a company of
about two hundred men for his secret purpose. All he told his recruits
was that they were to go on a mission to put a stop to the terrible
outrages of the “British” Indians upon the settlers. It was not until
they were again floating down the Ohio River toward the Mississippi that
he told them that they were out to capture three towns on the
Mississippi and the Wabash, which, as his two friends had found out for
him, were not well guarded by the British. Most of the people in these
towns were French settlers, but were under British rule. When they had
nearly reached the place where the Ohio flows into the Mississippi, they
left their boats and marched through tangled forests and across the
plains toward Kaskaskia, the nearest of the three towns. They arrived on
the Fourth of July, 1778, the second anniversary of American
independence. They hid for a whole day in a clump of trees and bushes on
the shore of the Mississippi. After nightfall Clark detailed half his
men to surround the village, and led the rest to the fort, where he
found the French commander of the fort giving a dance by the flaring
light of several torches. Some of the women of the settlement and
several Indians were present. The young Virginian went right in and
stood there smiling--it was so different from what he had
expected!--when an Indian spied him and gave an ear-splitting warwhoop.
The dancers stopped as if shot. All stared at the tall young officer
with the keen but kindly eyes. After a moment the newcomer raised his
voice and said, “Go on with the dancing, but I wish to announce that you
are no longer subjects of King George. This fort and this place now
belong to the State of Virginia.” As he spoke, his men burst in and
took the French officers prisoner. Clark added, to the village people,
“You can go to your homes, but you must stay there. All who leave their
houses to-night will do so under pain of death. The town is guarded by
my men.”
The French settlers spent the night in fear, for Clark disarmed the
village at once. Some of their chief men came to him next day to beg him
to spare their lives. The young commander shook hands with them and told
them that they need not be afraid of any one but the British. “King
Louis of France,” he explained, “is the friend of America. He is going
to help us in our fight for liberty.”
The French were all glad to hear the good news and lost no time in
swearing to be true to the United States government.
In his record, Clark went on:
“The scene was changed from almost dejection to that of joy in the
extreme--the bells ringing, the church crowded, returning
thanks--in short, every appearance of extravagant joy that could
fill a place with almost confusion.”
To Colonel George Rogers Clark and his sturdy pioneers this easy
campaign so far seemed like a pleasure excursion. They were well
received also at Fort Cahokia, on the Mississippi across from St. Louis.
Then a French volunteer took a few men to Fort Sackville at Vincennes
and placed them on guard there. Thus the three scattered strongholds of
the British in the Northwest Territory came to belong to the new State
of Virginia.