FROM 1713 TO 1755
La Vérendrye's adventuring to the West--Adventurers reach Lake
Winnipeg--From Assiniboine to Missouri--Intrigue with Indians--The
building of Louisburg--The siege of the great fort--Jokes bandied by
fighters--Quarrels left unsettled--Beyond the Alleghenies--Washington
and Jumonville--Braddock's march--Defeat of Braddock--Abbé Le
Loutre--The Acadians--Deportation of French--At Lake Champlain--Dieskau
defeated
What with clandestine raids and open wars, it might be thought that the
little nation of New France had vent enough for the buoyant energy of
its youth. While the population of the English colonies was nearing
the million mark, New France had not 60,000 inhabitants by 1759. Yet
what had the little nation, whose mainspring was at Quebec,
accomplished? Look at the map! Her bushrovers had gone overland to
Hudson Bay far north as Nelson. Before 1700 Duluth had forts at
Kaministiquia (near modern Fort Williams) on Lake Superior. Radisson,
Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle had blazed a trail to the Mississippi
from what is now Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. By 1701 La Motte
Cadillac had built what is now Detroit in order to stop the progress of
the English traders up the lakes to Michilimackinac; and by 1727 the
Company of the Sioux had forts far west as Lake Pepin. With Quebec as
the hub of the wheel, draw spokes across the map of North America.
Where do they reach? From Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, to the
Missouri, to the Upper Mississippi, to Lake Superior, to Hudson Bay.
Who blazed the way through these far pathless wilds? Nameless
wanderers dressed in rags and tatters,--outcasts of society, forest
rovers lured by the Unknown as by a siren, soldiers of fortune,
penniless, in debt, heartbroken, slandered, persecuted, driven by the
demon of their own genius to earth's ends,--and to ruin!
Spite of clandestine raids and open wars, New France was now setting
herself to stretch the lines of her discoveries farther westward.
It will be remembered it was at Three Rivers that the Indians of the Up
Country paused on their way down the St. Lawrence. {206} From the days
of Radisson in 1660 the passion for discovery had been in the very air
of Three Rivers. In this little fort was born in 1686 Pierre Gaultier
Varennes de La Vérendrye, son of a French officer. From childhood the
boy's ear must have been accustomed to the uncouth babblings of the
half-naked Indians, whose canoes came swarming down the river soon as
ice broke up in spring. One can guess that in his play the boy many a
time simulated Indian voyageur, bushrover, coming home clad in furs,
the envy of the villagers. At fourteen young Pierre had decided that
he would be a great explorer, but destiny for the time ruled otherwise.
At eighteen he was among the bushraiders of New England. Nineteen
found him fighting the English in Newfoundland. Then came the honor
coveted by all Canadian boys,--an appointment to the King's army in
Europe. Young La Vérendrye was among the French forces defeated by the
great Marlborough; but the Peace of Utrecht sent him back to Canada,
aged twenty-seven, to serve in the far northern fur post of Nepigon,
eating his heart out with ambition.
It was here the dreams of his childhood emerged like a commanding
destiny. Old Indian chief Ochagach drew maps on birch bark of a trail
to the Western Sea. La Vérendrye took canoe for Quebec, and, with
heart beating to the passion of a secret ambition, laid the drawings
before Governor Beauharnois. He came just in the nick of time.
English traders were pressing westward. New France lent ready ear for
schemes of wider empire. The court could grant no money for
discoveries, but it gave La Vérendrye permission for a voyage and
monopoly in furs over the lands he might discover; but the lands must
be found before there would be furs, and here began the mundane worries
of La Vérendrye's glory.
Montreal merchants outfitted him, but that meant debt; and his little
party of fifty grizzled woodrovers set out with their ninety-foot birch
canoes from Montreal on June 8, 1731. Three sons were in his party and
a nephew, Jemmeraie, from the Sioux country of the west. Every foot
westward had been consecrated by heroism to set the pulse of
red-blooded men jumping. There {207} was the seigniory of La Chine,
named in derision of La Salle's project to find a path to China. There
was the Long Sault, where Dollard had fought the Iroquois. There were
the pink granite islands of Georgian Bay, where the Jesuits had led
their harried Hurons. There was Michilimackinac, with the brawl of its
vice and brandy and lawless traders from the woods, where La Motte
Cadillac ruled before going to found Detroit. Seventy-eight days from
Montreal, there were the pictured rocks of Lake Superior, purple and
silent and deep as ocean, which Radisson had coasted on his way to the
Mississippi. Then La Vérendrye came to Duluth's old stamping
ground--Kaministiquia.
[Illustration: LA VÉRENDRYE'S FORTS AND THE RIVER OF THE WEST (After
Jeffery's map, 1762)]
The home-bound boats were just leaving the fur posts for the St.
Lawrence. Frosts had already stripped the trees of foliage, and winter
would presently lock all avenues of retreat in six months' ice. La
Vérendrye's men began to doubt the wisdom of chasing a will-o'-the-wisp
to an unknown Western Sea. The explorer sent half the party forward
with his nephew Jemmeraie and his son Jean, while he himself remained
at Kaministiquia with the mutineers to forage for provisions. {208}
Winter found Jemmeraie's men on the Minnesota side of Rainy Lake, where
they built Fort Pierre and drove a rich trade in furs with the encamped
Crees. In summer of 1732 came La Vérendrye, his men in gayest apparel
marching before the awe-struck Crees with bugle blowing and flags
flying. Then white men and Crees advanced in canoes to the Lake of the
Woods, coasting from island to island through the shadowy defiles of
the sylvan rocks along the Minnesota shore to the northwest angle.
Here a second winter witnessed the building of a second post, Fort St.
Charles, with four rows of fifteen-foot palisades and thatched-roofed
log cabins. The Western Sea seemed far as ever,--like the rainbow of
the child, ever fleeing as pursued,--and La Vérendrye's merchant
partners were beginning to curse him for a rainbow chaser. He had been
away three years, and there were no profits. Suspicious that he might
be defrauding them by private trade or sacrificing their interests to
his own ambitions, they failed to send forward provisions for this
year. La Vérendrye was in debt to his men for three years' wages, in
debt to his partners for three years' provisions. To fail now he dared
not. Go forward he could not, so he hurried down to Montreal, where he
prevailed on the merchants to continue supplies by the simple argument
that, if they stopped now, there would be total loss.
Young Jean La Vérendrye and Jemmeraie have meanwhile descended Winnipeg
River's white fret of waterfalls to Winnipeg Lake, where they build
Fort Maurepas, near modern Alexander,--and wait. Fishing failed. The
hunt failed. The winter of 1735-1736 proved of such terrible severity
that famine stalked through the western woods. La Vérendrye's three
forts were reduced to diet of skins, moccasin soup, and dog meat. In
desperation Jemmeraie set out with a few voyageurs to meet the
returning commander, but privation had undermined his strength. He
died on the way and was buried in his hunter's blanket beside an
unknown stream between Lake Winnipeg and the Lake of the Woods.
Accompanied by the priest Aulneau, young Jean de La Vérendrye decided
to rush canoes down from the Lake of the Woods to Michilimackinac for
food and powder. A furious pace was {209} to be kept all the way to
Lake Superior. The voyageurs had risen early one morning in June, and
after paddling some miles through the mist had landed to breakfast when
a band of marauding Sioux fell on them with a shout. The priest
Aulneau fell pierced in the head by a stone-pointed arrow. Young Jean
La Vérendrye was literally hacked to pieces. Not a man of the
seventeen French escaped, and Massacre Island became a place of ill
omen to the French from that day. At last came the belated supplies,
and by February of 1737 La Vérendrye had moved his main forces west to
Lake Winnipeg. This was no Western Sea, though the wind whipped the
lake like a tide,--which explained the Indian legend of an inland
ocean. Though it was no Western Sea, it was a new empire for France.
The bourne of the Unknown still fled like the rainbow, and La Vérendrye
still pursued.
[Illustration: MAP PUBLISHED IN PARIS IN 1752 SHOWING THE SUPPOSED SEA
OF THE WEST]
Down to Quebec for more supplies with tales of a vast Beyond Land!
Back to Lake Winnipeg by September of 1738 with canoes gliding up the
muddy current of Red River for the Unknown Land of the Assiniboines;
past Nettley Creek, then known as Massacre Creek or Murderers' River,
from the Sioux having slain the encamped wives and children of the Cree
who had gone to Hudson Bay with their furs; between the wooded banks of
what are now East and West Selkirk, flat to left, high to right;
tracking up the Rapids of St. Andrews, thick oak woods to east, {210}
rippling prairie russet in the autumn rolling to the west,--La
Vérendrye and his voyageurs came to the forks of Red River and the
Assiniboine, or what is now known as the city of Winnipeg. Where the
two rivers met on the flats to the west were the high scaffoldings of
an ancient Cree graveyard, bizarre and eerie and ghostlike between the
voyageurs and the setting sun. On the high river bank of what is now
known as Assiniboine Avenue gleamed the white skin of ten Cree tepees,
where two war chiefs waited to meet La Vérendrye. Drawing up their
canoes near where the bridge now spans between St. Boniface and
Winnipeg, the voyageurs came ashore.
It was a fair scene that greeted them, such a scene as any westerner
may witness to-day of a warm September night when the sun hangs low
like a blood-red shield, and the evening breeze touches the rustling
grasses of the prairie beyond the city to the waves of an ocean. It
was not the Western Sea, but it was a Sea of Prairie. It was a New
World, unbounded by hill or forest, spacious as the very airs of
heaven, fenced only by the blue dip of a shimmering horizon. It was a
world, though La Vérendrye knew it not, five times larger than New
France, half as big as all Europe. He had discovered the Canadian
Northwest.
One can guess how the tired wanderers at rest beneath the uptilted
canoes that night wondered whither their quest would lead them over the
fire-dyed horizon where the sun was sinking as over a sea. The Cree
chiefs told them of other lands and other peoples to the south, "who
trade with a people who dwelt on the great waters beyond the mountains
of the setting sun,"--the Spaniards.
Leaving men to knock up a trading post near the suburb now known as
Fort Rouge, La Vérendrye, on September 26, steers his canoes up the
shallow Assiniboine far as what is now known as Portage La Prairie,
where a trail leads overland to the Saskatchewan and so down to the
English traders of Hudson Bay. But this is not the trail to the
Western Sea; La Vérendrye's quest is set towards those people "who live
on the great waters to the south."
{211}
[Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE SUPPOSED SEA OF THE WEST, WITH
APPROACHES TO THE MISSISSIPPI AND GREAT LAKES, PARIS, 1755]
Fort de La Reine is built at the Portage of the Prairie, and October
18, to beat of drum, with flag flying, La Vérendrye marches forth with
fifty-two men towards Souris River for the land of the Mandanes on the
Missouri. December 3 he is welcomed to the Mandane villages; but here
is no Western Sea, only the broad current of the Missouri rolling
turbulent and muddy southward towards the Mississippi; but the Mandanes
tell of a people to the far west, "who live on the great waters bitter
for drinking, who dress in armor and dwell in stone houses." These
must be the Spaniards. La Vérendrye's quest has become a receding
phantom. Leaving men to learn the Missouri dialects, La Vérendrye
marched in the teeth of mid-winter storms back to the Portage of the
Prairie on the Assiniboine. Of that march, space forbids to tell. A
blizzard raged, driving the fine snows into eyes and skin like hot
salt. When the marchers camped at night they had to bury themselves in
snow to keep from freezing. Drifts covered all landmarks. The men
lost their bearings, doubled back on their own tracks, were
frost-bitten, buffeted by the storm, and short of food. Christmas
{212} was passed in the camps of wandering Assiniboines, and February
10, 1739, the fifty men staggered, weak and starving, back to the
Portage of the Prairie.
The wanderings of La Vérendrye and his sons for the next few years led
southwestward far as the Rockies in the region of Montana,
northwestward far as the Bow River branch of the Saskatchewan.
Meanwhile, all La Vérendrye's property had been seized by his
creditors. Jealous rivals were clamoring for possession of his fur
posts. The King had conferred on him the Order of the Cross of St.
Louis, but eighteen years of exposure and worry had broken the
explorer's health. On the eve of setting out again for the west he
died suddenly on the 6th of December, 1749, at Montreal.
Look again at the map! The spokes of the wheel running out from Quebec
extend to the Gulf of Mexico on the south, to the Rockies on the west,
to Hudson Bay on the north. And the population of New France does not
yet number 60,000 people. Is it any wonder French Canadians look back
on these days as the Golden Age?
And while the bushrovers of Canada are pushing their way through the
wilderness westward, there come slashing, tramping, swearing, stamping
through the mountainous wilds of West and East Siberia the Cossack
soldiers of Peter the Great, led by the Dane, Vitus Bering, bound on
discovery to the west coast of America. La Vérendrye's men have
crossed only half a continent. Bering's Russians cross the width of
two continents, seven thousand miles, then launch their crazily planked
ships over unknown northern seas for America. From 1729 to August of
1742 toil the Russian sea voyagers. Their story is not part of
Canada's history. Suffice to say, December of 1741 finds the Russian
crews cast away on two desert islands of Bering Sea west of Alaska, now
known as the Commander Islands. Half the crew of seventy-seven perish
of starvation and scurvy. Bering himself lies dying in a sandpit, with
the earth spread over him for warmth. Outside the sand holes, {213}
where the Russians crouch, scream hurricane gales and white billows and
myriad sea birds. The ships have been wrecked. The Russians are on an
unknown island. Day dawn, December 8, lying half buried in the sand,
Bering breathes his last. On rafts made of wreckage the remnant of his
crew find way back to Asia, but they have discovered a trail across the
sea to a new land. Fur hunters are moving from the east, westward.
Fur hunters are moving from the west, eastward. These two tides will
meet and clash at a later era.
The Treaty of Utrecht had stopped open war, but that did not prevent
the bushrovers from raiding the border lands of Maine, of
Massachusetts, of New York. The story of one raid is the story of all,
and several have already been related. Now comes a half century of
petty war that raged on the border lands from Saratoga and Northfield
to Maine and New Brunswick. The story of these "little wars," as the
French called them, belongs more to the history of the United States
than Canada.
Nor did the Peace of Utrecht stop the double dealing and intrigue by
which European rulers sought to use bigoted missionaries and ignorant
Indians as pawns in the game of statecraft.
"Sentiments of opposition to the English in Acadia must be secretly
fostered," commanded the King of France in 1715, two years after Acadia
had been deeded over to England. "The King is pleased with the efforts
of Père Rasle to induce the Indians not to allow the English to settle
on their lands," runs the royal dispatch of 1721 regarding the border
massacres of Maine. "Advise the missionaries in Acadia to do nothing
that may serve as a pretext for sending them out of the country, but
have them induce the Indians to organize enterprises against the
English," command the royal instructions of 1744. "The Indians,"
writes the Canadian Governor, "can be depended on to bring in the
scalps of the English as long as we furnish ammunition. This is the
opinion of the missionary, M. Le Loutre." Again, from the Governor of
New France: "If the settlers of {214} Acadia hesitate to rise against
their English masters, we can employ threats of the Indians and force.
It is inconceivable that the English would try to remove these people.
Letters from M. Le Loutre report that his Indians have intercepted
dispatches of the English officers. M. Le Loutre will keep us informed
of everything in Acadia. We have furnished him with secret signals to
our ships, which will tell us of every movement on the part of the
enemy."
Of all the hotbeds of intrigue, Acadia, from its position, had become
the worst. Here was a population of French farmers, which in half a
century had increased to 12,000, held in subjection by an English
garrison at Annapolis of less than two hundred soldiers so destitute
they had neither shoes nor stockings, coats nor bedding. The French
were guaranteed in the Treaty of Utrecht the freedom and privileges of
their religion by the English; but in matters temporal as well as
spiritual they were absolutely subject to priests, acting as spies for
the Quebec plotters.
France, as has been told, retained Cape Breton (Isle Royal) and Prince
Edward Island (Isle St. Jean), and the Treaty of Utrecht had hardly
been signed before plans were drawn on a magnificent scale for a French
fort on Cape Breton to effect a threefold purpose,--to command the sea
towards Boston, to regain Acadia, to protect the approach to the River
St. Lawrence.
The Island of Cape Breton is like a hand with its fingers stuck out in
the sea. The very tip of a long promontory commanding one of the
southern arms of the sea was chosen for the fort that was to be the
strongest in all America. On three sides were the sea, with outlying
islands suitable for powerful batteries and a harbor entrance that was
both narrow and deep. To the rear was impassable muskeg--quaking moss
above water-soaked bog. Two weaknesses only had the fort. There were
hills to right and left from which an enemy might pour destruction
inside the walls, but the royal engineers of France depended on the
outlying island batteries preventing any enemy gaining possession of
these hills. By 1720 walls thirty-six feet thick had encircled {215}
an area of over one hundred acres. Outside the rear wall had been
excavated a ditch forty feet deep and eighty wide. Bristling from the
six bastions of the walls were more than one hundred and eighty heavy
cannon. Besides the two batteries commanding the entrance to the
harbor was an outer Royal Battery of forty cannon directly across the
water from the fort, on the next finger of the island. Twenty years
was the fort in building, costing what in those days was regarded as an
enormous sum of money,--equal to $10,000,000. Such was Louisburg,
impregnable as far as human foresight could judge,--the refuge of
corsairs that preyed on Boston commerce; the haven of the schemers who
intrigued to wean away the Acadians from English rule, the guardian
sentinel of all approach to the St. Lawrence.
"It would be well," wrote the King the very next year after the treaty
was signed, "to attract the Acadians to Cape Breton, but act with
caution." And now twenty years had passed. Some Acadians had gone to
Cape Breton and others to Prince Edward Island; but statecraft judged
the simple Acadian farmer would be more useful where he was,--on the
spot in Acadia, ready to rebel when open war would give the French of
Louisburg a chance to invade.
Late in 1744 Europe breaks into that flame of war known as the Austrian
Succession. Before either Quebec or Boston knows of open war,
Louisburg has word of it and sends her rangers burning fishing towns
and battering at the rotten palisades of Annapolis (Port Royal). Port
Royal is commanded by that same Paul Mascarene of former wars, grown
old in service. The French bid him save himself by surrender before
their fleet comes. Though Mascarene has less than a hundred men, the
weather is in his favor. It is September. Winter will drive the
invaders home, so he sends back word that he will bide his time till
the hostile fleet comes. As for the Abbé Le Loutre, let the
treacherous priest beware how he brings his murderous Indians within
range of the fort guns! Meanwhile the Acadian habitants are threatened
with death if they do not rise to aid the {216} French, but they too
bide their time, for if they rebel and fail, that too means death; and
"_the Neutrals_" refuse to stir till the invaders, from lack of
provisions, are forced to decamp, and the Abbé Le Loutre, with his
black hat drawn down over his eyes, vanishes into forest with his crew
of painted warriors.
News of the war and of the ravaging of Acadian fishing towns set
Massachusetts in flame. To Boston, above all New England towns, was
Louisburg a constant danger. The thing seemed absolute stark
madness,--the thoughtless daring of foolhardy enthusiasts,--but it is
ever enthusiasm which accomplishes the impossible; and April 30, 1745,
after only seven weeks of preparation, an English fleet of sixty-eight
ships--some accounts say ninety, including the whalers and transports
gathered along the coast towns--sails into Gabarus Bay, behind
Louisburg, where the waters have barely cleared of ice. William
Pepperrell, a merchant, commands the four thousand raw levies of
provincial troops, the most of whom have never stepped to martial music
before in their lives. Admiral Warren has come up from West India
waters with his men-of-war to command the united fleets. Early Monday
morning, against a shore wind, the boats are tacking to land, when the
alarm bells begin ringing and ringing at Louisburg and a force of one
hundred and fifty men dashes downshore for Flat Cove to prevent the
landing. Pepperrell out-tricks the enemy by leaving only a few boats
to make a feint of landing at the Cove, while he swings his main fleet
inshore round a bend in the coast a mile away. Here, with a prodigious
rattling of lowered sails and anchor chains, the crews plunge over the
rolling waves, pontooning a bridge of small boats ashore. By nightfall
the most of the English have landed, and spies report the harbor of
Louisburg alive with torches where the French are sinking ships to
obstruct the entrance and setting fire to fishing stages that might
interfere with cannon aim. The next night, May 1, Vaughan's New
Hampshire boys--raw farmers, shambling in their gait, singing as they
march--swing through the woods along the marsh {217} behind the fort,
and take up a position on a hill to the far side of Louisburg, creating
an enormous bonfire with the French tar and ships' tackling stored
here. The result of this harmless maneuver was simply astounding. It
will be recalled that Louisburg had an outer battery of forty cannon on
this side. The French soldiers holding this battery mistook the
bonfire for the {218} English attacking forces, and under cover of
darkness abandoned the position,--battery, guns, powder and all,--which
the English promptly seized. This was the Royal Battery, which
commanded the harbor and could shell into the very heart of the fort.
[Illustration: WILLIAM PEPPERRELL]
The next thing for the English was to get their heavy guns ashore
through a rolling surf of ice-cold water. For two weeks the men stood
by turns to their necks in the surf, steadying the pontoon gangway as
the great cannon were trundled ashore; and this was the least of their
difficulties. The question was how to get their cannon across the
marsh behind the fort to the hill on the far side. The cannon would
sink from their own weight in such a bog, and either horses or oxen
would flounder to death in a few minutes. Again, the fool-hardy
enthusiasm of the raw levies overcame the difficulty. They built large
stone boats, raft-shaped, such as are used on farms to haul stones over
ground too rough for wagons. Hitching to these, teams of two hundred
men stripped to midwaist, they laboriously hauled the cannon across the
quaking moss to the hills commanding the rear of the fort, bombs and
balls whizzing overhead all the while, fired from the fort bastions.
It was cold, damp spring weather. The men who were not soaked to their
necks in surf and bog were doing picket duty alongshore, sleeping in
their boots. Consequently, in three weeks, half Pepperrell's force
became deadly ill. At this time, within two days, occurred both a
cheering success and a disheartening rebuff. A French man-of-war with
seventy cannon and six hundred men was seen entering Louisburg. As if
in panic fright, one of the small English ships fled. The French ship
pursued. In a trice she was surrounded by the English fleet and
captured. The flight of the little vessel had been a trick. A few
days later four hundred English in whaleboats attempted the mad project
of attacking the Island Battery at the harbor entrance. The boats set
out about midnight with muffled oars, but a wind rose, setting a
tremendous surf lashing the rocks, and yet the invaders might have
succeeded but for a piece of rashness. A hundred men had gained the
shore when, with the thoughtlessness of schoolboys, they uttered a
jubilant yell. {219} Instantly, porthole, platform, gallery, belched
death through the darkness. The story is told that a raw New England
lad was in the act of climbing the French flagstaff to hang out his own
red coat as English flag when a Swiss guard hacked him to pieces. The
boats not yet ashore were sunk by the blaze of cannon. A few escaped
back in the darkness, but by daylight over one hundred English had been
captured. Cannon, mortars, and musketoons were mounted to command the
fort inside the walls, and a continuous rain of fire began from the
hills. In vain Duchambon, the French commander, waited for
reënforcements from Canada. Convent, hospital, barracks, all the
houses of the town, were peppered by bombs till there was not a roof
intact in the place. The soldiers, of whom there were barely two
thousand, were ready to mutiny. The citizens besought Duchambon to
surrender. Provisions ran out. Looking down from the tops of the
walls, cracking jokes with the English across the ditch, the French
soldiers counted more than a thousand scaling ladders ready for
hand-to-hand assault, and a host of barrels filled with mud behind
which the English sharpshooters crouched. It had just been arranged
between Warren and Pepperrell that the {220} former should attack by
sea while the latter assaulted by land, when on June 16 the French
capitulated. How the New England enthusiasts ran rampant through the
abandoned French fort need not be told. How Parson Moody, famous for
his long prayers, hewed down images in the Catholic chapel till he was
breathless and then came to the officers' state dinner so exhausted
that when asked to pronounce blessing he could only mutter, "Good Lord,
we have so much to thank Thee for, time is too short; we must leave it
to eternity. Amen"; how the New Englanders, unused to French wines,
drank themselves torpid on the stores of the fort cellar; how the
French the next year made superhuman effort to regain Louisburg, only
to have a magnificent fleet of one hundred and fifty sail wrecked on
Sable Island, Duke d'Anville, the commander, dying of heartbreak on his
ship anchored near Halifax, his successor killing himself with his own
sword,--cannot be told here. Louisburg was the prize of the war, and
England threw the prize away by giving it back to France in the Treaty
of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. The English government paid back the
colonies for their outlay, but of all the rich French pirate ships
loaded with booty, captured at Louisburg by leaving the French flag
flying, not a penny's worth went to the provincial troops. Warren's
seamen received all the loot.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE FORTIFICATIONS AT LOUISBURG]
Like all preceding treaties, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle left
unsettled the boundaries between New France and New England. In
Acadia, in New York, on the Ohio, collisions were bound to come.
In Acadia the English send their officers to the Isthmus of Chignecto
to establish a fort near the bounds of what are now Nova Scotia and New
Brunswick. The priestly spy, Louis Joseph Le Loutre, leads his wild
Micmac savages through the farm settlement round the English fort,
setting fire to houses putting a torch even to the church, and so
compelling the habitants of the boundary to come over to the French and
take sides. The treaty has restored Louisburg to the French, but the
very {221} next year England sends out Edward Cornwallis with two
thousand settlers to establish the English fort now known as Halifax.
By 1752 there are four thousand people at the new fort, though the
Indian raiders miss no occasion to shoot down wayfarers and farmers;
and the French Governor at Quebec continues his bribes--as much as
eight hundred dollars a year to a man--to stir up hostility to the
English and prevent the Acadian farmers taking the oath of fidelity to
England. So much for the peace treaty in Acadia. It was not peace; it
was farce.
[Illustration: CONTEMPORARY PLAN OF THE ATTACK ON LOUISBURG]
In New York state matters were worse. The Iroquois had been
acknowledged allies of the English, and before 1730 the English fort at
Oswego had been built at the southeast corner of Lake Ontario to catch
the fur trade of the northern tribes coming down the lakes to New
France, and to hold the Iroquois' friendship. Also, as French traders
pass up the lake to Fort Frontenac (Kingston) and Niagara with their
national flag flying from the prow of canoe and flatboat, chance
bullets from the {222} English fort ricochet across the advancing
prows, and soldiers on the galleries inside Fort Oswego take bets on
whether they can hit the French flag. Prompt as a gamester, New France
checkmates this move. Peter Schuyler has been settling English farmers
round Lake Champlain. At Crown Point, long known as Scalp Point, where
the lake narrows and portage runs across to Lake George and the Mohawk
land, the French in 1731 erect a strong fort. As for the English
traders at Fort Oswego catching the tribes from the north, New France
counterchecks that by sending Portneuf in April of 1749, only a year
after the peace, to the Toronto portage where the Indians come from the
Upper Lakes by way of Lake Simcoe. What is now known as Toronto is
named Rouillé, after a French minister; and as if this were not
checkmate enough to the English advancing westward, the Sulpician
priest from Montreal, Abbé Picquet, zealously builds a fort straight
north of Oswego, on the south side of the St. Lawrence, to keep the
Iroquois loyal to France. Picquet calls his fort "Presentation." His
enemies call it "Picquet's Folly." It is known to-day as Ogdensburg.
Look at the map. France's frontier line is guarded by forts that stand
like sentinels at the gateways of all waters leading to the
interior,--Ogdensburg, Kingston, Toronto, Niagara, Detroit,
Michilimackinac, and La Vérendrye's string of forts far west as the
Rockies. New York's frontier line is guarded by one fort
only,--Oswego. Here too, as in Acadia, the peace is a farce.
[Illustration: FORT PRESENTATION]
But it was in the valley of the Ohio where the greatest struggle over
boundaries took place. One year after the peace, Céloron de Bienville
is sent in July, 1749, to take possession of the {223} Ohio for France.
France claims right to this region by virtue of La Salle's explorations
sixty years previously, and of all those French bushrangers who have
roved the wilds from the Great Lakes to Louisiana. Small token did
France take of La Salle's exploits while he lived, but great store do
her statesmen set by his voyages now that he has been sixty years dead.
"But pause!" commands the English Governor of Virginia. "Since time
immemorial have our traders wandered over the Great Smoky Mountains,
over the Cumberlands, over the Alleghenies, down the Tennessee and the
Kanawha and the Monongahela and the Ohio to the Mississippi." As a
matter of fact, one Major General Wood had in 1670 and 1674 sent his
men overland, if not so far as the Mississippi, then certainly as far
as the Ohio and the valley of the Mississippi. But Wood was a private
adventurer. For years his exploit had been forgotten. No record of it
remained but an account written by his men, Batts and Hallam. The
French declared the record was a myth, and it has, in fact, been so
regarded by the most of historians. Yet, curiously enough, ranging
through some old family papers of the Hudson's Bay Company in the
Public Records, London, I found with Wood's own signature his record of
the trip across the mountains to the Indians of the Ohio and the
Mississippi. It is probable that the {224} English cared quite as much
for claims founded on La Salle's voyage as the French cared for claims
founded on the horseback trip of Major General Wood's men. The fact
remained: here were the English traders from Virginia pressing
northward by way of the Ohio; here were the French adventurers pressing
south by way of the Ohio. As in Acadia and New York, peace or no
peace, a clash was inevitable.
[Illustration: CONTEMPORARY VIEW OF OSWEGO]
Duquesne has come out governor of Canada, and by 1753 has dispatched a
thousand men into the Ohio valley, who blaze a trail through the
wilderness and string a line of forts from Presqu' Isle (Erie) on Lake
Erie southward to Fort Duquesne at the junction of the Allegheny and
Monongahela, where Pittsburg stands to-day.
One December night at Fort Le Boeuf, on the trail to the Ohio, the
French commandant was surprised to see a slim youth of twenty years
ride out of the rain-drenched, leafless woods, followed by four or five
whites and Indians with a string of belled pack-horses. The young
gentleman introduces himself with great formality, though he must use
an interpreter, for he does not speak French. He is Major George
Washington, sent by Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to know why the
French have been seizing the fur posts of English traders in this
region. The French commander, Saint Pierre, receives the young
Virginian courteously, plies master and men with such lavish
hospitality that Washington has much trouble to keep his drunk Indians
from deserting, and dismisses his visitor with the smooth but bootless
response that as France and England are at peace he cannot answer
Governor Dinwiddie's message till he has heard from the Governor of
Canada, Marquis Duquesne. Not much satisfaction for emissaries who had
forded ice-rafted rivers and had tramped the drifted forests for three
hundred miles.
[Illustration: GOVERNOR DINWIDDIE OF VIRGINIA]
By January of 1754 Washington is back in Virginia. By May he is on the
trail again, blazing a path through the wilderness down the Monongahela
towards the French fort; for what purpose one may guess, though these
were times of piping peace. Come {225} an old Indian chief and an
English bushwhacker one morning with word that fifty French raiders are
on the trail ten miles away; for what purpose one may guess, spite of
peace. Instantly Washington sends half a hundred Virginia frontiersmen
out scouting. They find no trace of raiders, but the old chief picks
up the trail of the ambushed French. Here they had broken branches
going through the woods; there a moccasin track punctures the spongy
mold; here leaves have been scattered to hide camp ashes. At midnight,
with the rain slashing through the forest black as pitch, Washington
sets out with forty men, following his Indian guide. Through the dark
they feel rather than follow the trail, and it is a slow but an easy
trick to those acquainted with wildwood travel. Leave the path by as
much as a foot length and the foliage lashes you back, or the windfall
trips you up, or the punky path becomes punctured beneath moccasin
tread. By day dawn, misty and gray in the May woods, the English are
at the Indian camp and march forward escorted by the redskins, single
file, silent as ghosts, alert as tigers. Raindrip swashes on the
buckskin coats. Muskets are loaded and carefully cased from the wet.
The old chief stops suddenly . . . and points! There lie the French in
a rock ravine sheltered by the woods like a cave. The next instant the
French had leaped up with a whoop. Washington shouted "Fire!" When
the smoke of the musket crash cleared, ten French lay dead, among them
their officer, Jumonville; {226} and twenty-two others surrendered. No
need to dispute whether Washington was justified in firing on thirty
bush rovers in time of peace! The bushrovers had already seized
English forts and were even now scouring the country for English
traders. For a week their scouts had followed Washington as spies.
Expecting instant retaliation from Fort Duquesne, Washington retreated
swiftly to his camping place at Great Meadows and cast up a log
barricade known as Fort Necessity. A few days later comes a company of
regular troops. By July 1 he has some four hundred men, but at Fort
Duquesne are fourteen hundred French. The French wait only for orders
from Quebec, then march nine hundred bushrovers against Washington.
July 3, towards midday, they burst from the woods whooping and yelling.
Washington chose to meet them on the open ground, but the French were
pouring a cross fire over the meadow; and to compel them to attack in
the open, Washington drew his men behind the barricade. By nightfall
the Virginians were out of powder. Twelve had been killed and
forty-three were wounded. Before midnight the French beat a parley.
All they desired was that the English evacuate the fort. To fight
longer would have risked the extermination of Washington's troops.
Terms of honorable surrender were granted, and the next day--the day
which Washington was to make immortal, July 4--the English retreated
from Fort Necessity. Such was the peace in the Ohio valley.
Though the peace is still continued, England dispatches in 1755 two
regiments of the line under Major General Braddock to protect Virginia,
along with a fleet of twelve men-of-war under Admiral Boscawen. France
keeps up the farce by sending out Baron Dieskau with three thousand
soldiers and Admiral La Motte with eighteen ships. Coasting off
Newfoundland, the English encounter three of the French ships that have
gone astray in the fog. "Is it peace or war?" shout the French across
decks. "Peace," answers a voice from the English deck; and
instantaneously a hurricane cannonade rakes the decks of the French,
killing eighty. Two of the French ships surrendered. The other
escaped through the fog. Such was the peace!
{227} So began the famous Seven Years' War; and Major General Braddock,
in session with the colonial governors, plans the campaign that is to
crush New France's pretensions south of the Great Lakes. Acadia, Lake
Champlain, the Ohio,--these are to be the theaters of the contest.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF WASHINGTON'S JOURNAL]
Braddock himself, accompanied by Washington, marches with twenty-two
hundred men over the Alleghenies along the old trail of the Monongahela
against Fort Duquesne. Of Braddock, the least said the better. A
gambler, full of arrogant contempt towards all people and things that
were not British, hail-fellow-well-met to his boon companions,
heartless towards all outside the pale of his own pride, a blustering
bully yet dogged, and withal a gentleman after the standard of the age,
he was neither better nor worse than the times in which he lived. Of
Braddock's men, fifteen hundred were British regulars, the rest
Virginian bushfighters; and the redcoat troops held such contempt
towards the buckskin frontiersmen that friction arose from the first
about the relative rank of regulars and provincials. From the time
they set out, the troops had been retarded by countless delays. There
was trouble buying up supplies of beef cattle {228} among the
frontiersmen. Scouts scoured the country for horses and wagons to haul
the great guns and heavy artillery. Braddock's high mightiness would
take no advice from colonials about single-file march on a bush trail
and swift raids to elude ambushed foes. Everything proceeded slowly,
ponderously, with the system and routine of an English guardroom.
Scouts to the fore and on both flanks, three hundred bushwhackers went
ahead widening the bridle path to a twelve-foot road for the wagons;
and along this road moved the troops, five and six abreast, the red
coats agleam through the forest foliage, drums rolling, flags flying,
steps keeping time as if on parade, Braddock and his officers mounted
on spirited horses, the heavy artillery and supply wagons lagging far
behind in a winding line.
[Illustration: A SKETCH OF THE FIELD OF BATTLE AT BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT]
What happened has been told times without number in story and history.
It was what the despised colonials feared and any bushranger could have
predicted. July 9, in stifling heat, the marchers had come to a loop
in the Monongahela River. Braddock thought to avoid the loop by
fording twice. He was now within eight miles of Fort Duquesne--the
modern Pittsburg. Though Indian raiders had scalped some wanderers
from the trail and insolent messages had been occasionally found
scrawled in French on birch trees, not a Frenchman had been seen on the
march. The advance guard had crossed the second ford about midday when
the road makers at a little opening beyond the river saw a white man
clothed in buckskin, but wearing an officer's badge, dash out of the
woods to the fore, wave his hat, . . . and disappear. A moment later
the well-known war whoop of the French bushrovers tore the air to
tatters; and bullets rained from ambushed foes in a sheet of fire. In
vain the English drums rolled . . . and rolled . . . and soldiers
shouted, "The King! God save the King!" One officer tried to rally
his men to rush the woods, but they were shot down by a torrent of
bullets from an unseen foe. The Virginian bushfighters alone knew how
to meet such an emergency. Jumping from tree to tree for shelter like
Indians dancing sideways to avoid the enemy's aim, they had broken from
rank to fight in bushman fashion when Braddock {229} came galloping
furiously from the rear and ordered them back in line. What use was
military rank with an invisible foe? As well shoot air as an unseen
Indian! Again the Virginians broke rank, and the regulars, huddled
together like cattle in the shambles, fired blindly and succeeded only
in hitting their own provincial troops. Braddock stormed and swore and
rode like a fury incarnate, roaring orders which no one could hear,
much less obey. Five horses were shot under him and the dauntless
commander had mounted a fresh one when the big guns came plunging
forward; but the artillery on which Braddock had pinned his faith only
plowed pits in the forest mold. Of eighty officers, sixty had fallen
and a like proportion of men. Braddock ordered a retreat. The march
became a panic, the panic frenzied terror, the men who had stood so
stolidly under withering fire now dashing in headlong flight from the
second to the first ford and back over the trail, breathless as if
pursued by demons! Artillery, cattle, supplies, dispatch boxes,--all
were abandoned. Washington's clothes had been riddled by bullets, but
he had escaped injury. Braddock reeled from his horse mortally
wounded, to be carried {230} back on a litter to that scene of
Washington's surrender the year before. Four days later the English
general died there. Of the English troops, more than a thousand lay
dead, blistering in the July sun, maimed and scalped by the Indians.
Braddock was buried in his soldier's coat beside the trail, all signs
of the grave effaced to prevent vandalism.
[Illustration: PLAN OF FORT BEAUSÉJOUR]
Of all the losses the most serious were the dispatch boxes; for they
contained the English plans of campaign from Acadia to Niagara, and
were carried back to Fort Duquesne, where they put the French on guard.
The jubilant joy at the French fort need not be described. When he
heard of the English advance, Contrecoeur, the commander, had been
cooped up with less than one thousand men, half of whom were Indians.
Had Braddock once reached Fort Duquesne, he could have starved it into
surrender without firing a gun, or shelled it into kindling wood with
his heavy artillery. Beaujeu, an officer under Contrecoeur, had
volunteered to go out and meet the English. "My son, my son, will you
walk into the arms of death?" demanded the Indian chiefs. "My fathers,
will you allow me to go alone?" answered Beaujeu; and out he sallied
with six hundred picked men. It was Beaujeu whom Braddock's men had
seen dash out and wave his hat. The brave Frenchman fell, shot at the
first {231} volley from the English, and his Indian friends avenged his
death by roasting thirty English prisoners alive.
The Isthmus of Chignecto, or the boundary between New Brunswick and
Nova Scotia, was the scene of the border-land fights in Acadia. To
narrate half the forays, raids, and ambuscades would require a volume.
Fights as gallant as Dollard's at the Sault waged from Beauséjour, the
French fort north of the boundary, to Grand Pré and Annapolis, where
the English were stationed. After the founding of Halifax the Abbé Le
Loutre, whose false, foolish counsels had so often endangered the
habitant farmer, moved from his mission in the center of Acadia up to
Beauséjour on the New Brunswick side. Here he could be seen with his
Indians toiling like a demon over the trenches, when Monckton, the
English general, came on June 1, 1855, with the British fleet, to land
his forces at Fort Lawrence, the English post on the south side.
Colonel Lawrence was now English governor of Acadia, and he had decided
with Monckton that once and for all the French of Acadia must be
subjugated. The French of Beauséjour had in all less than fifteen
hundred men, half of whom were simple Acadian farmers forced into
unwilling service by the priest's threats of Indian raid in this world
and damnation in the next. Day dawn of June 4 the bugles blew to arms
and the English forces, some four thousand, had marched to the south
shore of the Missaguash River, when the French on the north side
uttered a whoop and emitted a clatter of shots. Black-hatted,
sinister, tireless, the priest could be seen urging his Indians on.
The English brought up three field cannon and under protection of their
scattering fire laid a pontoon bridge. Crossing the river, they
marched within a mile of the fort. That night the sky was alight with
flame; for Vergor, the French commander, and Abbé Le Loutre set fire to
all houses outside the fort walls. In a few days the English cannon
had been placed in a circle round the fort, and set such strange music
humming in the ears of the besieged that the Acadian farmers deserted
and the priest nervously thought of flight. Louisburg {232} could send
no aid, and still the bombs kept bursting through the roofs of the fort
houses. One morning a bomb crashed through the roof of the breakfast
room, killing six officers on the spot; and the French at once hung out
the white flag; but when the English troops marched in on June 16, at
seven in the evening, Le Loutre had fled overland through the forests
of New Brunswick for Quebec.
There scant welcome awaited the renegade priest. The French governors
had been willing to use him as their tool at a price ($800 a year), but
when the tool failed of its purpose they cast him aside. Le Loutre
sailed for France, but his ship was captured by an English cruiser and
he was imprisoned for eight years on the island of Jersey.
[Illustration: GENERAL MONCKTON]
Meanwhile, how was fate dealing with the Acadian farmers? Ever since
the Treaty of Utrecht they had been afraid to take the oath of
unqualified loyalty to England, lest New France, or rather Abbé Le
Loutre, let loose the hounds of Indian massacre on their peaceful
settlements. Besides, had not the priest assured them year in and year
out that France would recover Acadia and put to the sword those
habitants who had forsworn France? And they had been equally afraid to
side with the French, for in case of failure the burden of punishment
would fall on them alone. For almost half a century they had been
known as _Neutrals_. Of their population of 12,000, 3000 had been
lured away to Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton. When Cornwallis
had founded Halifax he had intended to wait only till the English were
firmly established, when he would demand an oath of unqualified
allegiance from {233} the Acadians. They, on their part, were willing
to take the oath with one proviso,--that they should never be required
to take up arms against the French; or they would have been willing to
leave Acadia, as the Treaty of Utrecht had provided, in case they did
not take the oath of allegiance. But in the early days of English
possession the English governors were not willing they should leave.
If the Acadians had migrated, it would simply have strengthened the
French in Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick.
Obstructions had been created that prevented the supply of transports
to move the Acadians. The years had drifted on, and a new generation
had grown up, knowing nothing of treaty rights, but only that the
French were threatening them on one side if they did not rise against
England, and the English on the other side if they did not take oath of
unqualified allegiance. Cornwallis had long since left Halifax, and
Lawrence, the English governor, while loyal to a fault, was, like
Braddock, that type of English understrapper who has wrought such
irreparable injury to English prestige purely from lack of sympathetic
insight with colonial conditions. For years before he had become
governor, Lawrence's days had been embittered by the intrigues of the
French with the Acadian farmers. He had been in Halifax when the Abbé
Le Loutre's Indian brigands had raided and slain as many as thirty
workmen at a time near the English fort. He had been at the Isthmus of
Chignecto that fatal morning when some Indians dressed in the suits of
French officers waved a white flag and lured Captain Howe of the
English fort across stream, where they shot him under flag of truce in
cold blood.
These are not excuses for what Lawrence did. Nothing can excuse the
infamy of his policy toward the Acadians. There are few blacker crimes
in the history of the world; but these facts explain how a man of
Lawrence's standing could assume the responsibility he did. In
addition, Lawrence was a bigoted Protestant. He not only hated the
Acadians because they were French; he hated them as "a colony of
rattlesnakes" because they were Catholics; and being an Englishman, he
despised them {234} because they were colonials. France and England
were now on the verge of the great struggle for supremacy in America.
Eighteen French frigates had come to Louisburg and three thousand
French regulars to Quebec. If Lawrence did not yet know that Braddock
had been defeated on July 9 at Duquesne,--as his friends declare in his
defense,--it is a strange thing; for by August the bloody slaughter of
the Monongahela was known everywhere else in America from Quebec to New
Spain. With Lawrence and Monckton and Murray and Boscawen and the
other English generals sent to conduct the campaign in Acadia, the
question was what to do with the French habitants. Let two facts be
distinctly stated here and with great emphasis: first, the colonial
officers, like Winslow from Massachusetts, knew absolutely nothing of
the English officers' plans; they were not admitted to the conferences
of the English officers and were simply expected to obey orders;
second, the English government knew absolutely nothing of the English
officers' course till it was too late for remedy. In fact, later
dispatches of that year inquire sharply what Lawrence meant by an
obscure threat to drive the Acadians out of the country.
[Illustration: GENERAL JOHN WINSLOW]
Did a darker and more sinister motive underlie the policy of Lawrence
and his friends? Poems, novels, histories have waged war of words over
this. Only the facts can be stated. Land to the extent of twenty
thousand acres each, which had belonged to {235} the Acadians, was
ultimately deeded to Lawrence and his friends. Charges of corruption
against Lawrence himself were lodged with the British government both
by mail and by personal delegates from Halifax. Unfortunately Lawrence
died in Halifax in 1760 before the investigation could take place; and
whether true or false, the odium of the charges rests upon his fame.
What he did with the Acadians is too well known to require telling. In
secret conclave the infamous edict was pronounced. Quickly messengers
were sent with secret dispatches to the officers of land forces and
ships at Annapolis, at Mines, at Chignecto, to repair to the towns of
the Acadians, where, upon opening their dispatches, they would find
their orders, which were to be kept a secret among the officers. The
colonial officers, on reading the orders, were simply astounded. "It
is the most grievous affair that ever I was in, in my life," declared
Winslow. The edict was that every man, woman, and child of the
Acadians should be forcibly deported, in Lawrence's words, "in such a
way as to prevent the reunion of the colonists." The men of the
Acadian settlements were summoned to the churches to hear the will of
the King of England. Once inside, doors were locked, English soldiers
placed on guard with leveled bayonet, and the edict read by an officer
standing on the pulpit stairs or on a table. The Acadians were snared
like rats in a trap. Outside were their families, hostages for the
peaceable conduct of the men. Inside were the brothers and husbands,
hostages for the good conduct of the families outside. Only in a few
places was there any rioting, and this was probably caused by the
brutality of the officers. Murray and Monckton and Lawrence refer to
their prisoners as "Popish recusants," "poor wretches," "rascals who
have been bad subjects." While the Acadians were to be deported so
they could never reunite as a colony, it was intended to keep the
families together and allow them to take on board what money and
household goods they possessed; but there were interminable delays for
transports and supplies. From September to December the deportation
dragged on, and when the Acadians, patient as sheep at the shambles,
became restless, some of the ships were sent off {236} with the men,
while the families were still on land. In places the men were allowed
ashore to harvest their crops and care for their stock; but harvest and
stock fell to the victors as burning hayricks and barns nightly lighted
to flame the wooded background and placid seas of the fair Acadian
land. Before winter set in, the Acadians had been scattered from New
England to Louisiana. A few people in the Chignecto region had escaped
to the woods of New Brunswick, and one shipload overpowered its
officers and fled to St. John River; but in all, six thousand six
hundred people were deported.
It is the blackest crime that ever took place under the British flag,
and the expulsion was only the beginning of the sufferers' woes. Some
people found their way to Quebec, but Quebec was destitute and in the
throes of war. The wanderers came to actual starvation. The others
wandered homeless in Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, in
Louisiana. After the peace of 1763 some eight hundred gathered
together in Boston and began the long march overland through the
forests of Maine and New Brunswick, to return to Acadia. Singing
hymns, dragging their baggage on sleighs, pausing to hunt by the way,
these sad pilgrims toiled more than one thousand miles through forest
and swamp, and at the end of two years found themselves back in Acadia.
But they were like ghosts of the dead revisiting scenes of childhood!
Their lands were occupied by new owners. Of their herds naught
remained but the bleaching bone heaps where the lowing cattle had
huddled in winter storms. New faces filled their old houses. Strange
children rambled beneath the little dormer windows of the Acadian
cottages, and the voices of the boys at play in the apple orchards
shouted in an alien tongue. The very names of the places had vanished.
Beauséjour was now Cumberland. Beaubassin had become Amherst.
Cobequid was now Truro. Grand Pré was now known as Horton. The
heart-broken people hurried on like ghosts to the unoccupied lands of
St. Mary's Bay,--St. Mary's Bay, where long ago Priest Aubry had been
lost. Here they settled, to hew out for themselves a second home in
the wilderness.
{237} It will be recalled that Braddock's plans had been captured by
the French, and those plans told Baron Dieskau, who had come out to
command the French troops, that the English under William Johnson, a
great leader of the Iroquois, inured to bush life like an Indian, were
to attack the French fort at Crown Point on Lake Champlain. Now
observe: on the Ohio, Braddock the regular had been defeated; in
Acadia, Lawrence and Monckton and Murray, the English generals, had
brought infamy across England's renown by their failure to understand
colonial conditions. At Lake Champlain the conditions are reversed.
Johnson, the English leader, is, from long residence in America, almost
a colonial. Dieskau, the commander of the French, is a veteran of
Saxon wars, but knows nothing of bushfighting. What happens?
[Illustration: MAP OF ACADIA AND THE ADJACENT ISLANDS, 1755]
Dieskau had intended to attack the English at Oswego, but the plans for
Johnson on Lake Champlain brought the commander of the French rushing
up the Richelieu River with three thousand soldiers, part regulars,
part Canadians. Crown Point--called Fort Frederick by the French--was
reached in August. No English are here, but scouts bring word that
Johnson has built a fort on the south end of Lake George, and, leaving
only five hundred men to garrison it, is moving up the lake with his
main troops.
{238}
[Illustration: SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON]
Fired by the French victories over Braddock, Dieskau planned to capture
the English fort and ambush Johnson on the march. Look at the map!
The south end of Lake Champlain lies parallel with the north end of
Lake George. The French can advance on the English one of two
ways,--portage over to Lake George and canoe up the lake to Johnson's
fort, or ascend the marsh to the south of Lake Champlain, then cross
through the woods to Johnson's fort. Dieskau chose the latter trail.
Leaving half his men to guard the baggage, Dieskau bade fifteen hundred
picked men follow him on swiftest march with provisions in haversack
for only eight days. September 8, 10 A.M., the marchers advance
through the woods on Johnson's fort, when suddenly they learn that
their scout has lied,--_Johnson himself is still at the fort_. Instead
of five hundred are four thousand English. Advancing along the trail
V-shape, regulars in the middle, Canadians and Indians on each side,
the French come on a company of five hundred English wagoners. In the
wild mêlée of shouts the English retreat in a rabble. "Pursue! March!
Fire! Force the place!" yells Dieskau, dashing forward sword in hand,
thinking to follow so closely on the heels of the rabble that he can
enter the English fort before the enemy know; but his Indians have
forsaken him, and Johnson's scouts have forewarned the approach of the
French. Instead of ambushing {239} the English, Dieskau finds his own
army ambushed. He had sneered at the un-uniformed plowboys of the
English. "The more there are, the more we shall kill," he had boasted;
but now he discovers that the rude bushwhackers, "who fought like boys
in the morning, at noon fought like men, and by afternoon fought like
devils." Their sharpshooters kept up a crash of fire to the fore, and
fifteen hundred doubled on the rear of his army, "folding us up," he
reported, "like a pack of cards." Dieskau fell, shot in the leg and in
the knee, and a bullet struck the cartridge box of the servant who was
washing out the wounds.
[Illustration: CONTEMPORARY MAP OF THE REGION OF LAKE GEORGE]
"Lay my telescope and coat by me, and go!" ordered Dieskau. "This is
as good a deathbed as anyplace. Go!" he thundered, seeing his second
officer hesitate. "Don't you see you are needed? Go and sound a
retreat."
A third shot penetrated the wounded commander's bladder. Lying alone,
propped against a tree, he heard the drums rolling a retreat, when one
of the enemy jumped from the woods with pointed pistol.
"Scoundrel!" roared the dauntless Dieskau; "dare to shoot a man
weltering in his blood." The fellow proved to be a Frenchman who had
long ago deserted to the English, and he muttered {240} out some excuse
about shooting the devil before the devil shot him; but when he found
out who Dieskau was, he had him carried carefully to Johnson's tent,
where every courtesy was bestowed upon the wounded commander. Johnson
himself lay wounded.
All that night Iroquois kept breaking past the guard into the tent.
"What do they want?" asked Dieskau feebly.
"To skin you and eat you," returned Johnson laconically. Whose was the
victory? The losses had been about even,--two hundred and fifty on
each side. Johnson had failed to advance to Crown Point, but Dieskau
had failed to dislodge Johnson. If Dieskau had not been captured, it
is a question if either side would have considered the fight a victory.
As it was, New France was plunged in grief; joy bells rang in New
England. Johnson was given a baronetcy and 5000 pounds for his
victory. He had named the lake south of Lake Champlain after the
English King, Lake George.
So closed the first act in the tragic struggle for supremacy in America.
{241}