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 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; 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!
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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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?
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.
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 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.
"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 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.
Bigot at Quebec—New France on verge of ruin—Bigot's vampires suck country's lifeblood—Scene on lake—Massacre at Fort William Henry—Louisburg besieged—Surrender of famous fort—The attack at Ticonderoga—Abercrombie's forces flee—Wolfe sails for Quebec—Signal fires forewarn approach of enemy—Both sides become scalp raiders—English fail at Montmorency—Slip silently down the great river—The two armies face each other—Death of Montcalm—Why New France fell
How stand both sides at the opening of the year 1756, on the verge of the Seven Years' War,—the struggle for a continent?
There has been open war for more than a year, but war is not formally declared till May 18, 1756.
Take Acadia first.
The French have been expelled. The infamous Le Loutre is still in prison in England, and when he is released, in 1763, he toils till his death, in 1773, trying to settle the Acadian refugees on some of the French islands of the English Channel. The smiling farms of Grand Pré and Port Royal lie a howling waste. Only a small English garrison holds Annapolis, where long ago Marc L'Escarbot and Champlain held happy revel; and the seat of government has been transferred to Halifax, now a settlement and fort of some five thousand people. So much for the English. Across a narrow arm of the sea is Isle Royal or Cape Breton, where the French are intrenched as at a second Gibraltar in the fortress of Louisburg. Since the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle restored the fort to the French, millions have been spent strengthening its walls, adding to the armaments; but Intendant Bigot has had charge of the funds, and Intendant Bigot has a sponge-like quality of absorbing all funds that flow through his hands. Cannon have been added, but there are not enough balls to go round. The walls have been repaired, but with false filling (sand in place of mortar), so that the first shatter of artillery will send them clattering down in wet plaster.
Take the Ohio next.
"Beautiful River" is the highway between New France and Louisiana. By Braddock's defeat the English have been driven out to a man. Matters are a thousandfold worse than before, for the savage allies of the French now swarm down the bush road cut by Braddock's army and carry bloody havoc to all the frontier settlements of Pennsylvania and Virginia. How many pioneers perished in this border war will never be known. It is a tale by itself, and its story is not part of Canada's history. George Washington was the officer in charge of a thousand bushfighters to guard this frontier.
Take the valley of Lake Champlain.
This is the highway of approach to Montreal north, to Albany south. Johnson had defeated Dieskau here, but neither side was strong enough to advance from the scene of battle into the territory of the enemy. The English take possession of Lake George and intrench themselves at the south end in Fort William Henry. Sir William Johnson strings a line of forts up the Mohawk River towards Oswego on Lake Ontario, and he keeps his forest rangers, under the famous scout Major Robert Rogers, scouring the forest and mountain trails of Lake Champlain for French marauder and news of what the French are doing. Rogers' Rangers, too, are a story by themselves, but a story which does not concern Canada. Skating and snowshoeing by winter, canoeing by night in summer, Rogers passed and repassed the enemy's lines times without number, as if his life were charmed, though once his wrist was shot when he had nothing to stanch the blood but the ribbon tying his wig, and once he stumbled back exhausted to Fort William Henry, to lie raging with smallpox for the winter. Among the forest rangers of New Hampshire and New York, Major Robert Rogers was without a peer. No danger was too great, no feat too daring, for his band of scouts. The English have established Fort William Henry at the south end of Lake George. The French checkmate the move by strengthening Crown Point on Lake Champlain and moving a pace farther south into English territory,—to Carillon, where the waters of Lake George pour into Champlain. Here on a high angle between the river and the lake, commanding all travel north and south, the French build Carillon or Fort Ticonderoga.
As for the Great Northwest, New France with her string of posts—Frontenac, Niagara, Detroit, Michilimackinac, Kaministiquia (Fort William), Fort Rogue (Winnipeg), Portage la Prairie—stretches clear across to the foothills of the Rockies. The English fur traders of Hudson Bay have, in 1754, sent Anthony Hendry up the Saskatchewan, but when Hendry comes back with word of equestrian Indians—the Blackfeet on horseback—and treeless plains, the English set him down as a lying impostor. Indians on horseback! They had never seen Indians but in canoes and on snowshoes! Hendry was dismissed as unreliable, and no Englishman went up the Saskatchewan for another ten years.
If the disasters of 1755 did nothing more, they at last stirred the home governments to action. Earl Loudon is sent out in 1756 to command the English, and to New France in May comes Louis Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, age forty-four, soldier, scholar, country gentleman, with a staff composed of Chevalier de Lévis, Bourlamaque, and one Bougainville, to become famous as a navigator.
Though New France consists of a good three quarters of America, things are in evil plight that causes Montcalm many sleepless nights. Vaudreuil, the French governor, descendant of that Vaudreuil who long ago set the curse of Indian warfare on the borders of New England, had expected to be appointed chief commander of the troops and jealously resents Montcalm's coming. With the Governor is leagued Intendant Bigot, come up from Louisburg. Bigot is a man of sixty, of noble birth, a favorite of the butterfly woman who rules the King of France,—the Pompadour,—and he has come to New France to mend his fortunes. How he planned to do it one may guess from his career at Louisburg; but Quebec offered better field, and it was to Bigot's interest to ply Montcalm and Vaudreuil with such tittle-tattle of enmity as would foment jealousy, keep their attention on each other, and their eyes off his own doings. As he had done at Louisburg, so he now did at Quebec. The King was requisitioned for enormous sums to strengthen the fort. Bigot's ring of friends acted as contractors. The outlay was enormous, the results trifling. "I think," complained the King, "that Quebec must be fortified in gold, it has cost so much." It was time of war. Enormous sums were to be expended for presents to keep the Indians loyal; and the King complains that he cannot understand how baubles of beads and powderhorns cost so much, or how the western tribes seem to become more and more numerous, or how the French officers, who distribute the presents, become millionaires in a few years. A friend of Bigot's handled these funds. There are meat contracts for the army. A worthless, lowbred scamp is named commissary general. He handles these contracts, and he, too, swiftly graduates into the millionaire class, is hail-fellow well met with Bigot, drinks deep at the Intendant's table, and gambles away as much as $40,000 in a single night. It is time of war, and it is time of famine too; for the crops have failed. Every inhabitant between the ages of fifteen and fifty has been drafted into the army. Not counting Indians, there is an army of fifteen to twenty thousand to be fed; so Bigot compels the habitants to sell him provisions at a low price. These provisions he resells to the King for the army and to the citizens at famine prices. The King's warehouse down by the Intendant's palace becomes known as La Friponne,—The Cheat.
And though the country is on verge of ruin, though poor people of the three towns are rioting in the streets for food, old women cursing the little wizened Intendant with his pimpled face as he rolls past resplendent in carriage with horses whose harness is a blaze of silver, the troops threatening to mutiny because they are compelled to use horse flesh,—though New France is hovering over a volcano of disaster, they dance to their death, thoughtless as butterflies, gay as children, these manikin imitators of the French court, who are ruining New France that they may copy the vices of an Old World playing at kingcraft. The regular troops are uniformed in white with facings of blue and red and gold and violet, three-cornered hat, and leather leggings to knee. What with chapel bells ringing and ringing, and bugle call and counter call echoing back from Cape Diamond; what with Monsieur Bigot's prancing horses and Madame Péan's flashy carriage,—Madame Péan of whom Bigot is so enamored he has sent her husband to some far western post and passes each evening at her gay receptions,—what with the grounding of the sentry's arms and the parade of troops, Quebec is a gay place these years of black ruin, and the gossips have all they can do to keep track of the amours and the duels and the high personages cultivating Madame Péan; for cultivated she must be by all who covet place or power. A word from Madame Péan to Bigot is of more value than a bribe. Even Montcalm and De Lévis attend her revels.
Twenty people sup with Monsieur Bigot each night, either at the Intendant's palace down by Charles River, or nine miles out towards Beauport, where he has built himself the Forest Hermitage, now known as Château Bigot,—a magnificent country manor house of red brick, hidden away among the hills with the gay shrubberies of French gardens set down in an American wilderness. Supper over by seven, the guests sit down to play, and the amount a man may gamble is his social barometer, whether he lose or win, cheat or steal. If dancing follows gambling, the rout will not disperse till seven in the morning. What time is left of the twenty-four hours in a day will be devoted to public affairs.
Montcalm's salary is only 25,000 francs, or $5,000. To maintain the dignity of the King, the commander in chief must keep the pace, and he too gives weekly suppers, with places set for forty people, "whom I don't know," he writes dejectedly to his wife, "and don't want to know; and wish that I might spend the evenings quietly in my own chamber." To Montcalm, who was of noble birth with no shamming, this lowbred pretense and play at courtcraft became a bore; to his staff of officers, a source of continual amusement; but De Lévis presently falls victim to a pair of fine eyes possessed by the wife of another man.
War filled the summers, but the winters were given up to social life; and of all midwinter social gayeties the most important was the official visit of the Governor and the Intendant to Montreal. By this time a good road had been cut from Quebec to Montreal along the north shore, and the sleighs usually set out in January or February. Bigot added to the occasion all the prestige of a social rout. All the grand dames and cavaliers of Quebec were invited. Baggage was sent on ahead with servants to break the way, find quarters for the night, and prepare meals. After a dinner at the Intendant's palace the sleighs set out, two horses to each, driven tandem because the sleigh road was too narrow for a team. Each sleigh held only two occupants, and to the damage done by fair eyes was added the glow of exhilaration from driving behind spirited horses in frosty air with the bells of a hundred carryalls ringing across the snow. At seven was pause for supper. High play followed till ten. Then early to bed and early to rise and on the road again by seven in the morning! In Montreal was one continual round of dinners and dances. Between times, appointments were made to the military posts and trading stations of the Up-Country. He who wanted a good post must pay his court to Madame Péan. No wonder Montcalm breathed a sigh of relief when Lent put a stop to the gayeties and he could quietly pass his evenings with the Sulpician priests. To break from Bigot's ring during the war was impossible. Creatures of his choosing filled the army, handled the supplies, controlled the Indians; and when the King's reproof became too sharp, Bigot simply threatened to resign, which wrought consternation, for no man of ability would attempt to unwind the tangle of Bigot's dishonesty during a critical war. Montcalm wrote home complaints in cipher. The French government bided its time, and Bigot tightened his vampire suckers on the lifeblood of the dying nation. The whole era is a theme for the allegory of artist or poet.
Montcalm had arrived in May of 1756. By midsummer he was leading three thousand French artillerymen across Lake Ontario from Fort Frontenac (Kingston), to attack the English post on the south side, Oswego. Inside the fort walls were seven hundred raw English provincials, ill of scurvy from lack of food. The result need scarcely be told. Seven hundred ill men behind wooden walls had no chance against three thousand soldiers in health with heavy artillery. To take the English by surprise, Montcalm had crossed the lake on August 4 by night. Two days later all the transport ships had landed the troops and the cannon had actually been mounted before the English knew of the enemy's presence. On the east side of the river was Fort Ontario, a barricade of logs built in the shape of a star, housing an outguard of three hundred and seventy men. On discovering the French, the sentry spiked their cannon, threw their powder in the river, and retired at midnight inside Oswego's walls. Working like beavers, Montcalm's men dragged twenty cannon to a hill commanding the fort, known as "Fort Rascal" because the outfort there was useless to the English. Before Montcalm's cannonade Oswego's walls, plastered with clay and rubble, fell like the staves of a dry barrel. The English sharpshooters then hid behind pork barrels placed in three tiers filled with sand; but Colonel Mercer, their officer, was literally cut in two by a cannon shot, and the women, cooped up inside the barracks, begged the officers to avoid Indian massacre by surrender. A white flag was waved. Including women, something under a thousand English surrendered themselves prisoners to Montcalm. The Indians fell at once to mad plunder. Spite of the terms of honorable surrender, the English were stripped of everything, and only Montcalm's promise of $10,000 worth of presents to the savages prevented butchery. The victors decamped to Montreal, well pleased with the campaign of 1756. It need not be told that there were constant raids and counter raids along the frontier during the entire year.
Loudon, the English commander, did not arrive in New York till well on in midsummer of 1756, and he found far different material from the trained bushfighters in the hands of Montcalm. The English soldiers were raw provincial recruits, dressed, at best, in buckskin, but for the most part in the rough homespun which they had worn when they had left plow and carpenter's bench and fishing boat. While Montcalm was capturing Oswego, Loudon was licking his rough recruits into shape, "making men out of mud" for the campaign of 1757. Indeed, it was said of Loudon, and the saying stuck to him as characteristic of his campaign, that he resembled the wooden horse figure of a tavern sign,—always on horseback but never rode forward. Instead of striking at Lake Champlain or on the Ohio, where the French were aggressors, Loudon planned to repeat the brilliant capture of Louisburg. July of 1857 found him at Halifax planting vegetable gardens to prevent scurvy,—"the cabbage campaign" it was derisively called,—and waiting for Gorham's rangers to reconnoiter Louisburg. Gorham's scouts brought back word that the French admiral had come in with twenty-four men-of-war and seven thousand men. To overpower such strength meant a prolonged siege. It was already August. Loudon sailed back to New York without firing a gun, while the English fleet, trying to reconnoiter Louisburg, suffered terrible shipwreck.