1909 Champlain Tercentenary
Report of the NY Lake Champlain Tercentenary Commission
to the Legislature of the State of New York, Sept. 19, 1911

THE STORY OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN

THE DISCOVERY

These daring Frenchmen were of the stuff of which heroes are made, in a century which bred men of heroic temper; they were intrepid, ardent, and gallant, after the manner of their race. A history of splendid audacity on the uncharted Sea of Darkness, as they called the Atlantic, lay behind them; a romantic and tragic history of laborious adventure, uncalculating heroism, and perils without number lay before them.

Behind them were the cliffs of Quebec, on which the most picturesque city of the continent was to rise, the mountain on whose slope Montreal was to build itself with the solidity of the Old and the brightness of the New World, and the slope on which Toronto was to gather itself around its beautiful park, its Parliament House, and its University; the St. Lawrence, majestic among rivers for its volume, its scenery, its magnificent tumult of birth at Niagara, and its impressive sweep through a gulf which is like a sea into the Atlantic; behind them, too, was half a continent which was to be contended for by two races and to become the home of both, united in the building of a great and powerful empire, English in name and loyalty, in energy and power of administration, French in tradition, in ancient courtesy of hospitality and the love of life.

Of this brilliant and stirring future, so impressive to us today, Champlain had no vision as he re-embarked and was swept along through forests teeming with game, past meadows sweet with the odors of the young summer, until the river widened into the lake that was to bear his name to the remotest future. Isle a La Motte, beautiful in its green expanse and its lovely outlooks, Grande Isle and Long Island, lay in his path as he entered the tranquil waters of Champlain. It was a landscape of quiet but varied and striking beauty into which this brave French gentleman came about July 4, 1609.

Before him the Lake stretched to the south and lured the imagination on its own voyage of discovery beyond the farther dip of the sky; on his right the Adirondack wilderness was spread out league on league, hill rising behind hill to the noble mass and altitude of Marcy and Whiteface; to the left the forests climbed to the summit of Mansfield; the shores were indented by almost numberless inlets and bays, and the primeval forests came down to the water’s edge in a long sweep of unbroken foliage.

As the little flotilla moved southward under the quiet stars, silent as the night itself, they passed Split Rock, with the mysterious serpent coiled on its face — a place sacred in the unwritten annals of the aborigines, and a symbol of the savage life to which the coming of Champlain was the unsuspected approach of doom. To the west the solitude of the woods which have since become a priceless Forest of Arden for rest, sport, and health was unbroken save by the softly falling tread of moccasined hunters; to the south, through the beautiful Mohawk valley, stretched the lodges of the Five Nations, the implacable, tireless, war-loving Iroquois, the most daring and skillful of Indian fighters, who had been driven from the Champlain valley a century and a half earlier by their ancestral enemies, the Algonquins.

If the gallant French gentleman, high-minded and generous of spirit, whom the paddles of Algonquin warriors were bearing swiftly southward could have heard the terrible cries that were to haunt those woods in the near future and for many a later year, and seen as in a vision the horror of torture and the bitterness of death that were to be enacted again and again in places which nature had made for temples and homes, he might have turned backward and left the valley to its vast solitude and silence. But in the drama of human life, never without its monitions of tragedy, and yet moving through storm and blood to a widening peace and higher ordering of society, it was ordained that Champlain should be the harbinger of war and desolation in the very hour in which he was to grasp the crown of the discoverer.

A GREAT FIGURE APPEARS

It was a dramatic moment when morning broke, for no European had ever been seen in the wilderness, and the dawn was the rising of the curtain on a drama in which four races were to appear; a war that was to involve half the world was to be fought, and the destiny of a continent decided.

The Algonquins landed as soon as it was light; the Iroquois, erect as the pines about them, vigorous, daring, and vindictive, left the shelter of their barricades and moved through the woods with the steadiness of veteran troops, the plumes of their chiefs leading the onset. Then, with dramatic quickness, the ranks of the Algonquins opened and Champlain, partly in armor, advanced and stood between them; a strange and ominous figure in the eyes of his enemies if they had known it, the foe alike of Iroquois and Algonquins; the impersonation of that aggressive force of civilization which sweeps the lesser race irresistibly before it as it moves with the momentum of a glacier.

Standing on the edge of the forest, steel on his breast and thighs, a plumed casque on his head, a sword at his side, an arquebus in his hand, on that July morning eleven years before the landing at Plymouth, two months before Henry Hudson discovered the Hudson, Champlain holds the center of the stage, the earliest of the men of striking personality who were to appear in this beautiful valley; second to none of them in nobility of purpose and greatness of soul; dividing with La Salle the preeminence of fame among Frenchmen in America. He incarnated in that moment the genius of France, its immense service to America, the story of discovery, exploration, adventure, heroism, and sacrifice which it was to contribute to the finding and making of the New World. Today we celebrate their dauntless courage, their restless energy, their enthusiasm, which no danger could check and no toil exhaust.

As England sent her great sailors and adventurers from Devonshire, whose rocky coasts in the mists of sunset are beautiful as the gates of fairyland, France sent her sailors and explorers from the harbors of Normandy and Brittany, where men of heroic mold gained tempered strength on the high seas. They were a gallant company, those daring Frenchmen who sailed up the St. Lawrence, crossed the wilderness and the prairie, spread the first sail on the inland lakes, and floated down the Mississippi to the Gulf, penetrating to the heart of the continent, and leaving behind them in all the localities where they or their successors stayed — at Detroit, at St. Louis, at New Orleans, and in small towns — a tradition of courtesy and a touch of distinction which have persisted through the centuries.

The hardy men of Dieppe and Honfleur who were fishing off the coasts of Newfoundland four centuries ago; Jacques Cartier, sailing out of the harbor where St. Malo still prospers behind her walls and Millet’s statue of Chateaubriand looks seaward; Jean Nicollet, Joliet, Marquette, Frontenac, Hennepin, Tonty, Bienville, La Salle (one of the greatest names in our early history); the Jesuit Fathers who kept company with hardship and death so many decades — how these great figures stand out in the morning light of the New World!

On that historic morning when he stood between the two bands of Indian warriors Champlain was forty-two years old. Born not far from Rochelle, in a country which, like Devon, Normandy, and Brittany, was a nursery of sailors, Champlain knew the sea from his youth and loved it. A gentleman by birth and training, he was brave and hardy, of great strength, calm in danger, resourceful and swift in action; strict in discipline, but always just and kind; a Frenchman in his blitheness of spirit and a certain inextinguishable gayety which hardship could not dim, he was a man to be loved and honored.

No more chivalrous and gallant figure appears in the New World story. He belongs with the Founders and Builders, and rightly bears the proud title, the “Father of New France.” Parkman places his name first among the pioneers of our forests. “It was he who struck the deepest and boldest strokes into the heart of their pristine barbarism. . . . The preux che’valier, the crusader, the romance-loving explorer, the curious knowledge-seeking traveler, the practical navigator, all found their share in him. . . . His books mark the man — all for his theme and purpose, nothing for himself. Crude in style, full of the superficial errors of carelessness and haste, rarely diffuse, often brief to a fault, they bear on every page the palpable impress of truth.”

His heart was in the New World. In Paris, he tells us, he walked the streets in a dream, recalling the mystery of the deep woods, hearing above the tumult of the ancient city the music of trees swaying in the wind, seeing with that inward eye which is alike the bliss of solitude and of the squares where mighty streams of men converge, the long aisles of the unexplored forest; full, too, of a mighty compassion for the Indians, and holding the saving of a soul better worth while than the founding of an empire.

Such was the man who faced the Iroquois, looking at him with startled surprise, as at a visitor from another planet, on that fateful July morning. In his quaint but graphic style he has described his part in the fight. “I looked at them and they looked at me. When I saw them getting ready to shoot their arrows at us, I leveled my arquebus, which I had loaded with four balls, and aimed straight on one of the three chiefs. The shot brought down two and wounded another. On this, our Indians set up such a yelling that one could not have heard a thunderclap, and all the while the arrows flew thick on both sides. The Iroquois were greatly astonished and frightened to see two of their men killed so quickly, in spite of the arrow-proof armor. As I was reloading, one of my companions fired a shot from the woods, which so increased their astonishment that, seeing their chiefs dead, they abandoned the field and fled into the depths of the forest.”

Then followed the customary orgies of torture and death, from which Champlain turned with loathing and horror, begging his allies to put their victims out of misery by shooting them; and so falls the curtain on the first act of the drama of races and nations in the Champlain valley. Henceforth the Iroquois were the implacable enemies of the French.

SEEDS OF CONFLICT

The English colonists at the south and east lived with arms in their hands and in the face of constant peril, but they were mainly homemakers, with small thought of wide conquests; concerned chiefly with getting roofs over their heads and seed in the ground. They were fighting here and there as they set their stakes farther and farther into the wilderness; but their advance was slow and they were but a thin line of pioneers building larger than they knew.

The French, on the other hand, had great ambitions from the beginning. They were not primarily settlers, homemakers, farmers; they were ardent explorers, bent on bringing a new empire under French rule, soldiers eager to establish French authority in the farthest confines of the wilderness; devoted priests whose joy it was to plant the cross in savage places and to sing the Mass in savage ears, tireless apostles of a Church whose annals they enriched with almost numberless martyrdoms.

The English crept slowly forward as they needed land for their immediate purposes; the French swept, few in numbers but dauntless in courage, to the very heart of the continent, inspired by great dreams of empire, of the glory of France, of the spread of the faith. Inevitably, therefore, they met fierce opposition over a thousand miles of territory from an enemy who saw in them a foe to be faced and fought to the death. In that long and disorderly warfare Lake Champlain appears and reappears as the record touches now one point and now another, now a column moving with shining arms through the woods, now a flotilla sweeping across the lake, now a skirmish desperately fought; always bands of braves stealing through the trees, alert, implacable, tireless.

War between the rival colonists, divided by race, by faith, by temperament, was chronic, as was war between the French and the Iroquois; subsiding for a few years, and then breaking out afresh in some local incident or inspired by the incessant bickering of the two nations at home. In the dead of winter in 1690 a small army of French and Indians might have been seen moving silently on the ice; two weeks later the blazing settlement at Schenectady, like a great torch, revealed their destination.

In one of these minor struggles, in the intervals between the greater and more significant combats, a figure of heroic mold appears in the person of Captain John Schuyler, of Albany; a man of intrepid energy and intimate familiarity with border warfare, the bearer of a name of the highest distinction in the history of New York, and the forerunner of one of the purest-minded and noblest-hearted leaders of Revolutionary struggle. Within sound of the guns of Montreal, this daring soldier avenged the destruction of Schenectady.

A year later another Schuyler, Philip, passed over the same route which his brother had taken, fought a desperate battle with a large force sent out from Montreal, and brought his men off in safety after assaulting and capturing Fort La Prairie.

In 1709 a considerable force of colonists from New York and New England, with five hundred warriors from the lodges of the Five Nations, passed over a road built by the State from Albany to the lake, but returned without meeting the French; the expedition against Quebec, which was part of the general plan to seize Canada, proving equally futile.

The importance of the lake as a highway north and south was now clearly seen, and both English and French recognized its strategic importance; but the French, organized on a military basis, acted first, in 1731 they built a fort at Crown Point, which was called St. Frédéric, the English meantime claiming the title to the territory on both sides the lake. The Governor-General of Canada began to issue grants of great sections of land, Isle La Motte being included in the first of these gifts to French officials and soldiers. Few of these tracts were settled within the time fixed by the grants, and the territory largely reverted to the Crown; the modern love of scenery was still in embryo, and the social Frenchmen shrank from the isolation of life in the wilderness.

New York was sluggish of action in those days of loose organization; it had the keys of Canada in its hands, but allowed the French to entrench themselves on the lake and make ready for the decisive struggle for the control of the continent that was fast approaching. For two decades Crown Point was a menacing stronghold and the base of many irritating forays.

A FRONTIER BARON

The leadership of the expedition against Crown Point was assigned to Sir William Johnson, and was to be made up of colonists and Indians. The Indians held back at first; they found the colonists too little occupied with war. “Look at the French,” they said; “they are men, they are fortifying everywhere.” In the end they joined forces with the colonists, and in July General Lyman arrived with six hundred troops from New England and promptly began building Fort Lyman. When Sir William Johnson reached the camp a month later, he found himself in command of more than three thousand men.

Mr. Norton once said of Lowell that in the crisis of the war between the States his voice was worth an army corps; Johnson was the equivalent of a division. Intrepid, resourceful, accustomed to create conditions instead of conforming to them, flexible in habit, enamored of the freedom of frontier life, and daring enough to use it to the full, Johnson knew the Indian mind and habit more intimately perhaps than any other man in the colonies; and, what was more important, he had the firm friendship and confidence of the Indians. He lived on the Mohawk on easy terms with life, and especially with his Indian neighbors.

An Irishman by birth, he was strongly built, of a commanding spirit and a jovial temper. His house was a castle and a club; it could stand a siege or give hospitality of bed and food and drink to an army of friends. Its master was a born host who drank flip with the Dutch settlers and Madeira with the royal governors; he could trade with the instinct of a modern financier of the advanced school; he could preside at Indian councils and use all the devices of Indian oratory, and he had a genius for international marriages.

Johnson’s army was a miscellaneous one; he danced the war dance with his Indians; there were good men and true in it, and there were colonists who came reluctantly and were eager to be back on their farms; they wore many kinds of clothes and carried all sorts of arms. Its morals were variously reported. Parkman quotes William Smith, of New York, as saying, “Not a chicken has been stolen”“— a statement unique in the annals of civilized wars. Colonel Ephraim Williams, one of the honorable company of American founders of colleges, wrote: “We are a wicked, profane army, especially the New York and Rhode Island troops. Nothing to be heard among a great part of them but the language of Hell. If Crown Point is taken, it will not be for our sakes, but for those good people left behind.” It ought to be remembered that the language of New York has often sounded profane in New England ears, when it was only informally picturesque.

There were also prayers and sermons and psalm-singing — largely, it may be suspected, in the New England camps, though even there one detects signs of our common humanity. “As to rum,” writes Colonel Williams, “it won’t hold out nine weeks;” and he adds these significant words, “Things appear most melancholy to me.” Things went slowly, as they usually did with colonial armies. Johnson managed to dine on venison and cheered his guests with good wine; incidentally he gave one of the loveliest lakes in America the name it still bears.

On a day in early September, the French commander, Dieskau, misled by a report that the English had retreated, advanced from Ticonderoga to the point where Whitehall now stands, left a part of his troops, moved forward along the edges of a marsh as far as the head of South Bay, abandoned his canoes, and plunged into the forest, about fifteen hundred men in all — regular troops, Canadians, and Indians. The following evening they were within three miles of a detachment of colonists. Captured drivers of wagons told the French that they had been misled and that the English lay in force at the lake. Many Indians promptly deserted, but the daring Dieskau pushed forward and met a column of English troops.

The French regulars were halted on the road, the Canadians with the Indians who remained were hidden in the woods. Johnson meantime had been informed of Dieskau’s movements, and decided to send a thousand men in two detachments to “catch the enemy in their retreat?” The protest of the Mohawk chief who picked up a stick and easily broke it and then tried in vain to break several sticks was heeded, and the detachments were united; but the experienced fighter still demurred. “If they are to be killed,” he said, “they are too many; if they are to fight, they are too few.”

The ambush had been skillfully laid, and when the English advanced the forest suddenly broke into a blaze of musket shots. Colonel Williams rode swiftly up a little rise of ground, calling his men to follow him, and fell with a bullet through his brain; one of those heroic spirits whose mortality finds its witness here as well as there, and whose name lives in one of the most beautiful of American colleges.

Under the terrible enveloping fire of an invisible enemy the colonists recoiled, pressed forward in the face of the murderous flame, and then broke in confusion amid the yells of the Indians. Colonel Williams was still in the fight in the indomitable spirit of his troops, who rallied, made a brave retreat, and ended “the bloody morning scout.”

An hour after Williams set out the main camp heard the shouts of their retreating comrades, built a hasty barricade with wagons and trunks of trees, planted cannon, and made ready for an assault. Fifteen hundred farmers, most of whom had never heard a gun fired save in sport, their nerves shaken by the catastrophe of the morning, waited the advance of the French regulars marching down the forest road, war-whoops bursting from the woods, and the Canadians and Indians rushing down the wooded hillside. The colonists held their fire until their enemies were close at hand, and then swept the white-coated ranks with grape and compelled them to seek the shelter of the trees, and the fight became a furious fusillade.

For an hour Dieskau drove in succession against Johnson’s right, center and left, until he was struck by a shot in the leg, and while the wound was being dressed was shot again in the knee and thigh. Seated behind a tree, the brave Frenchman refused to be moved, and ordered his adjutant to leave him and make a final charge against Johnson’s position. But the day was lost; the colonists rushed from their entrenchment, fell like a whirlwind on the French, and drove them in confusion from the field. Dieskau was shot again and was carried to Johnson’s quarters, where he narrowly escaped being burned and eaten by the furious Mohawks. He lived to return to Paris and to tell the story of his adventures with Gallic fire and effectiveness.

Johnson failed to follow his victory by a decisive blow; his army was re-enforced; the November snows began to fall, the November winds to howl through the leafless trees; the men began to desert in squads, and the camp broke up. Parkman sums up the campaign in a phrase: “The Crown Point expedition was a failure disguised under an incidental success.” Johnson had changed the name of Lake George, and transformed Fort Lyman into Fort Edward; he had built Fort William Henry, and he had withstood a furious onslaught on his position, but Crown Point and Ticonderoga remained in the hands of the French. He knew, however, how to take the tide at the turn; England soon rang with the story of his bravery, his picturesque career, his commanding personality; Parliament gave him the substantial recognition of five thousand pounds and the King made him a baronet!

The French took advantage of the period of inaction which followed this indecisive struggle to entrench themselves at Ticonderoga, where two thousand men were set to work building Fort Carillon. An attempt to surprise the garrison of Fort William Henry was foiled by the energy of John Stark, one of the picturesque figures of the later struggle, whose version at the battle of Bennington of the famous phrase “Victory or Westminster Abbey” had a touch of Yankee domesticity.

Fort William Henry, after a brave resistance under command of the spirited Monro, fell into the hands of Montcalm. The story of the massacre which followed when the French lost control of their Indian allies is the most terrible in the history of a region familiar with savage atrocity. Montcalm, a man of the highest standards of honor, begged the infuriated Indians to kill him and spare the English who were under his protection; but their fury was not stayed until they were met by an escort sent out to bring in the fugitives. For many decades the tradition of the slaughter of the fated column that set out from Fort William Henry for Fort Edward was the blackest in the annals of the colonies and a lasting grief to Montcalm.

THE DECISIVE STRUGGLE

Voltaire’s remark that ‘ such was the complication of political interests that a cannon-shot fired in America could give the signal that set Europe in a blaze” gains dramatic effect when we remember that the man who fired that shot, not from a cannon, but from a musket, was George Washington on the Western frontier; the noblest figure who has yet appeared in the New World, unconspicuously opening the gate of the Great West and the gate of the Far East in the same moment.

Parkman sums up the outcome of this impressive struggle in a few pregnant sentences: “The Seven Years’ War made England what she is. It crippled the commerce of her rival, ruined France in two continents, and blighted her as a colonial power. It gave England the control of the seas and the mastery of North America and of India, made her the first of commercial nations, and prepared that vast colonial system that has planted new Englands in every quarter of the globe. And while it made England what she is, it supplied to the United States the indispensable condition of their greatness, if not of their National existence.”

MONTCALM

A native of Nimes, a student and lover of the Humanities, trained in Latin and Greek, a devout reader of the best literature, aspiring to membership in the French Academy. Montcalm was forty-four years old when he appeared at Ticonderoga. He had already served with distinction in the French army and gained an enviable reputation as a commander. Behind the hardships, dangers, and heroism of his service in America one sees always the beautiful home in the fair landscape of Provence, the passionately loved wife, the group of children, the pleasant garden where his heart rested in infinite content, and to which his thoughts traveled with infinite longing until that September day when he fell on the Heights of Abraham, the women crying out as he was borne through the gate of Quebec: “He is killed! The Marquis is killed!” “Do not weep for me, my children,” he answered; “it is nothing.” And when he was told that the wound was mortal: “So much the better,” he said: “ I shall not live to see Quebec surrendered.”

So fell the curtain on one of the noble figures who have lighted the long history of France as with clear-burning torches fed by self-sacrifice; so happily fell Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham, sacred to the memory of two heroes who entered into immortality through the same gate.

But Montcalm had great labors before him when he took command at Ticonderoga. On the 4th of July, 1758, Lake George was covered by a vast flotilla organized by General Abercromby, but inspired by Lord Howe, bearing the largest army that had yet been seen in America, fifteen thousand strong, to the northern end of the lake, whence the troops moved into the woods.

The regiments leading the march fell into disorder in the dense forests, and were set upon by a party of French who had been watching them from a hill; the main body of the English, opportunely arriving, cut off the attacking force from their base. The French commander, a man of experience in woodcraft, attempted to reach Ticonderoga by a circuit through the forest, but also lost his bearings. These incidents would be of slight consequence if a French bullet had not struck Lord Howe, leading the English column, ended a career of singular promise, and wrecked Abercromby’s movement.

The elder brother of Viscount Howe, the Admiral, and of Sir William Howe, Washington’s antagonist a few years later, the young officer who fell in an otherwise unimportant skirmish between Lake George and Ticonderoga, had touched the imagination and won the hearts of the colonists. He had made himself the comrade of his troops, and adopted their methods of fighting instead of insisting on repeating in American forests the tactics of Old World campaigns in the open country. A wave of sorrow swept the country when the news of his death came, and a monument placed in Westminster by Massachusetts attests the singular and tender regard in which he was held.

THE DEFEAT AT TICONDEROGA

Montcalm quickly supplemented and strengthened his position by throwing up a barricade of trees which hid and protected his men on the ridge which rises northwest of Ticonderoga, and covered the approaches with densely interwoven boughs. A quick-witted antagonist might have made this position untenable by seizing Mount Defiance; but General Abercromby was not quick-witted. Misled by a report that Montcalm was about to be reinforced and making the fatal blunder of underrating the genius of Montcalm and the fighting qualities of the French, he ordered an assault in the most difficult and perilous form, a solid bayonet charge — a form of attack obviously impossible.

But Abercromby, like some other commanders of that and later periods, took no account of conditions and accepted no advice from colonists, and sent his troops to death in a hopeless task. Caught in the tangle of boughs, swept by grape and shot, the English and the colonists flung themselves through the long, hot July afternoon with desperate and despairing valor against the deadly network in front of the barricades, only to be driven back, shattered and broken. When night fell two thousand men, dead or wounded, had paid the terrible price of Abercromby’s dullness. When the story of this disastrous battle was told, with accounts of the hasty retreat to Fort William Henry, the colonists revenged themselves by calling the incompetent commander “Mrs. Nabbycrombie.”

There were brighter days for English rule in the near future; Louisburg was to be taken for the last time, Duquesne was to be abandoned, Niagara and Fort Frontenac were to pass into English hands, and Wolfe was to climb the steep ascent to victory at Quebec; but the curtain drops on the second act in the drama of race struggle in the valley of Lake Champlain.

THE COLONISTS IN ARMS

The colonists, separated by long distances and slow methods of transit, were divided one from another by local ignorance, provincial jealousies, differences of conviction in matters of religion, statecraft, education, and social order: the struggle on the long frontier had made them aware of a common danger and accustomed them to community of action. Franklin’s statesmanlike plan for union was in advance of public opinion, but events were fast ripening the colonial mind for this larger conception of political life in the New World.

The years following the struggle with the French were full of agitation and growing restlessness. A home government carried on by a few men ignorant of vital conditions across the Atlantic and of the temper of the high-spirited, freedom-loving Englishmen on the edges of the undeveloped continent, and a great group of colonists, sensitive, independent, restless under a rule which was un-English in spirit and largely in method, involved ultimately an appeal to arms, and the War of the American Revolution took its place as a phase of the struggle for popular government among the English-speaking peoples. In its inception not a conflict between two peoples but between a small party at home and a dominant majority beyond seas, it inevitably grew into a decisive trial of strength, bred deep misunderstandings, created passionate antagonisms, and turned the very kinship of the contestants into a source of bitterness.

Time and distance, making possible that larger perspective in which events assume their true proportions and relations, and the acts of men stand revealed in their motives, have wrought their ancient and beautiful miracle of healing, and brought in that knowledge which is the unshakable foundation of friendship and respect. “How can I hate him? “said Charles Lamb of one of the most unpopular men of his day; “how can I hate him? I know him.” In the light of this knowledge we celebrate today the common sincerity and courage of those who faced one another on almost half a hundred fields, and recognize that larger movement of events which makes those who call themselves enemies fight together in the great war for the emancipation of humanity.

THE STRUGGLE TO COMMAND THE LAKE

The colonists had gone to Canada more than once in the days of French dominion, and when hostilities broke out the thoughts of the New England patriots turned swiftly to the north. At the very beginning of the struggle a dashing exploit stirred the blood of the whole country.

Benedict Arnold eagerly advocated an expedition against Ticonderoga and Crown Point, and went to Berkshire to raise men to carry the project into effect. There he found himself forestalled by Ethan Allen, a leader among the “Green Mountain Boys,” who were banded together to resist the encroachments of New York, and a typical colonial American in his sturdy self-reliance, his celerity of action, and his impartial indifference to the formalities of peace or war. This picturesque fighter was acting partly on his own authority and partly on the authority of Connecticut, and declined to recognize the claim of Arnold to the command of the expedition.

Thereupon Arnold, who was more eager to fight than to hold office, joined the expedition as a volunteer. At daybreak on May 10th Allen and Arnold crossed the lake with eighty-three men and unceremoniously broke the slumbers of the Ticonderoga garrison. When the English officer in command, rudely called from his bed, asked Allen under whose authority he acted, tradition puts into his mouth the brave words, “In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.”

The exact phraseology of Wellington at Waterloo, of Washington when he met Charles Lee at Monmouth, and of Ethan Allen on that historic morning is of small consequence; Allen, by deed and in word, fired the imagination of the thirteen colonies and gave ringing voice to their spirit and purpose.

Later in the year a colonial force was at Ticonderoga, and news came that Sir Guy Carleton was planning, with the Iroquois, to make an attack from Canada; a counter-attack upon Montreal was promptly undertaken, and late in August, 1775, General Richard Montgomery, one of the finest tempered men of his time, with two thousand men, advanced quickly, from Ticonderoga to Fort St. Johns, and two months later entered Montreal, and issued a proclamation urging the Canadians to send delegates at once to the Continental Congress; a delightfully picturesque example of American optimism and an expression, premature in time and ineffective in form, of the lasting friendship which was to come between the Dominion and the United States.

Benedict Arnold, who, in the opening days of his career, was the soul of alert audacity and uncalculating daring, made a heroic march meantime through dense forests and across turlmlent streams and climbed the Heights of Abraham the day after Montgomery entered Montreal.

Quebec declined to surrender, Carleton escaped from Montreal in disguise and took command of the beleaguered city, and Montgomery was forced to come to the aid of Arnold. In a heavy snowstorm, at the darkest hour before dawn on the last day of the year, the two commanders made assaults on two sides of the town, and both fell at what promised to be the moment of success. Arnold was carried from the field severely wounded; and a company of Virginians, under a commander as gallant as themselves, drove themselves like a wedge into the heart of the city. But Montgomery lay dead beyond the walls, and the audacious expedition ended in disaster.

The return of Montgomery to New York, borne in state down the Hudson, past the balcony where his devoted wife stood to honor him, is one of the beautiful traditions of war, and his monument in St. Paul’s churchyard in the heart of New York is a perpetual reminder to the throngs that pass and repass on lower Broadway that success lies not in getting but in giving, not in hoarding but in spending. Frederick the Great, the first military authority of his time, praised Montgomery’s generalship, and Arnold became a popular hero on both sides the Atlantic. English schoolboys saw his portrait in shop windows in little English towns, and knew the story of his daring.

BENEDICT ARNOLD

When summer came Sir Guy had twelve thousand men afloat on the upper lake, and Arnold was working with furious energy at a little fleet manufactured out of hand in Vermont. In September, three schooners, two sloops, three galleys, and eight other craft lay off Valcour Island waiting for the English army from the north, and on the 11th day of October, English and American seamen met for the first time in those many trials of strength which have been conspicuous for valor and skill on both sides. After a day of desperate fighting, Arnold’s little squadron had inflicted heavy injuries on Sir Guy’s fleet, but was itself almost disabled.

Its commander’s genius, compounded in equal measure of swift insight and swifter action, in the darkness of the night carried his flotilla through the English lines, made for Crown Point, and was not overtaken until near that haven. He sent the fleet with every inch of canvas spread to Crown Point, met three of the largest of Sir Guy’s ships, fought four hours with desperate courage, ran his sinking schooner covered with dead and dying men into a small creek and set her afire, her flag flying until the flames plucked it down. A little later his whole force was in Ticonderoga. Sir Guy, having gained control of the lake, withdrew his army.

BURGOYNE AT TICONDEROGA

On the second anniversary of Bunker Hill General Burgoyne appeared before Ticonderoga with an army of nearly eight thousand men, half of them British regulars commanded by officers of tried capacity. The fort was regarded by the colonists as impregnable, and General St. Clair held it confidently with less than half the number of his opponents. As has often happened since the days of Achilles, there was one vulnerable spot: a crag a mile to the south offered an altitude from which the fort could be swept by cannon.

General Phillips, one of Burgoyne’s most skillful officers, saw the weak point in the situation of the American force. “Where a goat can go a man may go; and where a man can go he can haul up a gun,” said Phillips, and under his gallant leadership the men went and hauled up the guns with them, and on the morning of July 5th there they stood, red-coated and triumphant, on Mount Defiance. St. Clair had his choice of surrender or escape, and, being a sensible person he reversed the English action and stole across the lake in the darkness. General Fraser went hot-footed after the Americans, overtook the rear-guard near the village of Hubbardtown, was falling back after a sharp engagement, when he was reinforced, turned, and routed the retreating forces.

Ticonderoga again changed hands and there were those in England who thought the fight was won; in the colonies there were profound discouragement and the usual prompt and unintelligent criticisms. General Schuyler, who was in command of the department, especially suffered; but Schuyler was of a purity and steadfastness which, sooner or later, emerge the whiter for the testing of self-control and patience.

Leaving a large force at Ticonderoga, General Burgoyne set out on the campaign which reflected great credit on his courage but brought irretrievable disaster to his army, wrecked the plan to divide the colonies, and made the final success of the Americans possible. A brave and gallant soldier, a kindly and tender-hearted man, it was his unhappy fate, probably under orders from London, to employ Indian allies, and he tried to pledge them to civilized warfare by forbidding the killing of old men, of women, and of children, and the scalping of living prisoners. ‘When these injunctions were read in England, Burke, who with Charles James Fox and a small group of the ablest public men of the time, exercised for Americans that right of representation in Parliament which was part of the American contention, made one of his most striking speeches. Suppose that there was a riot on Tower Hill,” he said; “what would the keeper of his Majesty’s lions do? Would he not fling open the dens of the wild beasts and address them thus? My gentle lions, my humane bears, my tender-hearted hyenas, go forth! But I exhort you, as you are Christians and members of civilized society, to take care not to hurt any man, woman, or child.’”

The story of the campaign which ended in the surrender of Burgoyne’s army, of Schuyler’s noble patience and more than Roman dignity, of Arnold’s daring and splendid self-forgetfulness, crying out as he fell with a shattered leg to the man who would have driven a bayonet into his assailant, “For God’s sake, don’t hurt him; he’s a fine fellow,” does not belong to the Champlain valley, though so closely associated with it. It was the tragedy of the Revolution that Arnold did not die on that heroic day when he was the lion of the American army, the idol of the American people, the friend of Washington, the dauntless hero of Quebec and Saratoga. The Arnold of Lake Champlain is the most brilliant figure of the Revolution; if he could have died then, with what words of love and honor we should celebrate him today! Now we cover him and turn our faces away.

THE BATTLE OF PLATTSBURGH

When the War of 1812 began, there were two gunboats in a harbor on the Vermont side; during the summer this force was reinforced by two sloops and four scows; an improvised fleet, ridiculous in size and armament, but a flexible and effective tool in the hands of a skillful and daring commander of the energy of Commodore Macdonough. The flagship of this tiny squadron, the Saratoga, carried twenty-six guns; the English flagship, the Confiance, thirty-seven guns.

In the judgment of the Duke of Wellington, the control of the lake was vital to the success of the invasion which was to inflict a crushing blow on the Americans. An army of nearly fourteen thousand men was massed on the frontier under the command of Sir George Prevost. On the last day of August this force crossed the line and marched without opposition to Chazy, entering Plattsburgh on the evening of September 6th. General Macomb retreating across the river and taking up the bridges. The decisive moment was at hand, and could be made decisive only by the destruction of the American fleet.

On the 11th day of September the fleet was at anchor in Cumberland Bay; General Macomb, with less than five thousand men, was entrenched on the Bay in such a position as to support the fleet but unable to fire on the English vessels without endangering the American ships. The bay, two miles wide, afforded sufficient room for the maneuvering of the diminutive squadrons.

The English fleet came up with a north tide from Cumberland Head, the Confiance with her battery of thirty-seven guns leading the way, followed by the Linnet, the Chub, and the Finch, supported by eleven gunboats. The Confiance was to engage the Saratoga, giving the Eagle a broadside as she passed on her way; while the Linnet and Chub were to close with the Eagle. Three English ships were to meet the two strongest American vessels, while the Finch, with the gunboats, was to engage the American rear. The American gunboats were stationed between the shore and the fleet and were negligible in the result.

The English fleet rounded Cumberland Head on the morning of the 11th, the Finch leading the way, followed by the Confiance, Linnet, and Chub. The Confiance promptly attacked the Eagle, drew fire of the entire American fleet, the wind failed and she was unable to execute the plan of action, but her first broadside killed one-fifth of the Saratoga’s crew; the Linnet performed her part by engaging the Eagle, but the Chub suffered such damage that she drifted through the American lines and pulled down her flag. The Linnet, strongly handled, drove the Eagle from the line. The Finch drifted ashore a mile south of the fighting ground and kept her flag at the mast after her consorts had surrendered.

The fight became a contest between the Saratoga and the Eagle on the American side and the Confiance and Linnet on the English side, and it was fought to a finish in two hours and twenty minutes. The Eagle, practically silenced on one side, ran down the line, swung her effective side toward the enemy, and kept up a destructive fire on the Confiance. The Saratoga, similarly disabled on the starboard side, followed the tactics of the Eagle, fighting with one arm after the other had been made useless. The Confiance, bereft of her ropes and anchors, was unable to maneuver, and, with only four guns workable, finally struck her colors, followed fifteen minutes after by the Linnet.

It was a gallant fight and the English and American seamen, who are now cheering one another in the harbors of the world, eager, it may be suspected, to stand by in any hour of need, fought with the desperate courage and native aptitude for struggle on the high seas which have placed the two modern navies, on a great disparity so far as numbers are concerned, on the same footing so far as gallantry and skill are concerned. So ended the battle of Plattsburgh and the long history of armies and fleets, of the roar of cannon and tumult of battle, in the valley of Lake Champlain. Even then the light of a happier day was in the east.

A contemporary record reads in this wise: “The wounded of both fleets, and our army, the same evening, were landed at our cantonment on the island. The enemy was not neglected; prompt assistance was indiscriminately rendered. Those who had but one hour previous been deadly foes, now lodged by each other’s side, like brothers and friends, giving and receiving the tenderest words of consolation.”

Almost a century has passed since hostile fleets made the hills echo with the thunder of their guns, and armies fought their perilous ways through the wilderness. Today these are memories of “far-off, unhappy things and battles long ago.” A hundred years of peace have come and gone and brought prosperity of hand and brain, of field and craft, of knowledge and religion. Colonial towns have become cities, and two score villages look out from under shaded streets to the great hills whence cometh our help. Health, rest, and pleasure have found the valley of the lake one of those fastnesses of peace and beauty which, like the Garden of the Hesperides, the fair land of the Phmacians, the forest of Arden, are refuges of the spirit from the turmoil and care, the toil and weariness, of the working world.

But nobler than all other prosperities that have come to this beautiful valley, to this lovely lake around which the hills keep watch and ward, is that spirit of brotherhood, that larger and diviner thought of life, which today bring together Indian, Frenchman, Englishman, Canadian, American, ancient foes become modern friends; their rivalries the contests of skill and industry, their differences those divergences of talent and temperament which give society its endless variety and interest, their competitions the struggles of those who run together for the prizes of life, their growing rest in faith in one another the prophecy of that happier age which is already at our doors.

Fair France: protagonist of liberty through tragic or peaceful years, fearless to face the destiny to which her ardent spirit leads her, lover of beauty and tireless artificer of the things of art, swift to believe in the greatness of humanity and slow to give up her vision of equality and fraternity — how much does civilization owe to her intrepid spirit, her dauntless heart, her restless energy! Manners, freedom, power — they are all hers, and ours because they are hers!

England, the garden of the world, in whose shaded lanes, venerable colleges, stately homes, and soaring cathedrals the American finds the background of his early associations, the shrines of the language he speaks and the literature to which he is heir; England, ripe with the beauty of age but strong in unwasted energy of spirit; rarely without her vision, never without her task; poet with her Shakespeare, sailor with her Nelson, soldier with her Wolfe, statesman with her Chatham, organizer and ruler with her Cromer!

Canada, home of two races and happy in their comradeship, builder of stately cities, of growing universities, reaper of a prosperity won by hardy toil and sturdy self- reliance, a Dominion swiftly passing into an empire! The Indian, survivor of a people whose story is the tragedy of the undeveloped in the path of the organized race; victim of the law which impels alike the aggressor and the exiled; oppressed that others might be free!

The United States, the host of the day, and proud of the friends who keep the festival of peace on her soil; warden of the open gate; keeper of the open house; eager, impulsive, often blundering, always bearing in her heart that faith in man which is faith in God, flowering in the furrows of time and toil!

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