WARREN COUNTY

A HISTORY AND GUIDE

AMERICAN GUIDE SERIES

From the collection of the

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WARREN COUNTY A History and Guide

AMERICAN GUIDE SERIES

WARREN COUNTY

A HISTORY AND GUIDE

Compiled by workers of the 'Writers' Program

of the Work Projecfs Administration

in the Sfate of New York

AMERICAN GUIDE SERIES

ILLUSTRATED

PUBLISHED BY THE WARREN COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS

PRINTED BY THE GLENS FALLS POST COMPANY MCMXLII

COPYRIGHT 1942 BY THE WARREN COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS

NEW YORK STATE DIVISION OF COMMERCE

State-wide Sponsor of the New York State Writers' Project

FEDERAL WORKS AGENCY BRIG. GEN. PHILIP B. FLEMING, Administrator

WORK PROJECTS ADMINISTRATION HOWARD O. HUNTER, Commissioner

FLORENCE KERR LESTER W. HERZOG

Assistant Commissioner State Administrator

THIS VOLUME IS SPONSORED BY

THE WARREN COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS

RICHARD J. BOLTON, Hague, Chairman

EDWARD M. VANDENBURGH . . . Bolton

FRANK MINZEY Caldwell

CLARENCE CARPENTER Chester

EDGAR LAHAISE Glens Falls

JOHN S. WOODWARD ...... Glens Falls

NORMAN H. BEATY Glens Falls

GEORGE W. BRAYTON Glens Falls

JOHN F. REARDON Glens Falls

ALLEN L. MEADE Horicon

CHARLES S. KENWELL Johnsburg

NATHAN PROLLER Luzerne

JABEZ N. INGALSBE Queensbury

DAVID I. MANN Stony Creek

FLOYD MAXAM Thurman

WYMAN D. PASCO Warrensburg

ADVISORY COMMITTEE

MR. ARTHUR POUND

New York State Historian Albany

MR. ALEXANDER W. MILLER

Superintendent of Schools Glens Falls

MR. ROBERT N. KING

Science Teacher, High School Faculty Glens Falls

MR. WILLIAM H. WINTERS

Chief Inspector, Conservation Department . . . Glens Falls

MR. WALLACE LAMB

Supervising Principal, Bolton High School . . Bolton Landing

MR. JOHN R. STICKNEY

Superintendent of Schools Bolton Landing

Miss KATHLEEN I. OSBORNE

Superintendent of Schools North Creek

MR. LYNN F. PERKINS

Superintendent of Schools Lake Luzerne

Preface

THIS book presents a picture of Warren County and its people today against the background of its history. To local residents it offers a basis for fuller appreciation and understanding of their County's present resources and future potentialities as well as the part it played in earlier days.

To the thousands of visitors who throng Warren County's highways, streams, lakes, beaches, and mountain trails the book will point out new vistas, and add interest and significance to their experiences here. By word and picture it brings to distant homes a memory and a promise of swimming, open-air theater, race track, ski run, and solitude beside lake or stream, in a forest, or on a rocky summit.

Warren County covers 876 square miles; it has 175 miles of paved Federal and State highways and 850 miles of county and town roads, some paved, some the kind of country dirt roads that invite leisurely exploration. Large areas protected by rangers of the Adirondack Park are accessible only by bridle path or hiking trail.

Besides visitors from near and far, Warren County has a typically American resident population. These hospitable, intelligent people, many of whom provide accommodations for visitors, have added important recreational developments to the attractions nature has bestowed on Warren County. More than half the County's population is centered in and near Glens Falls, at the southeastern entrance to the Adirondacks. Here varied industries provide employment, and the business district serves a rural and resort area.

The New York State Writers' Project of the Work Projects Adminis- tration, having completed a comprehensive guide for New York State (1940), has prepared this Warren County History and Guide under the sponsorship of the Warren County Board of Supervisors. The Writers' Project staff has received aid from many local people, but only a few can be mentioned here. The Glens Falls Post Company gave full access to newspaper files; the Crandall Library at Glens Falls and other libraries in the County spared neither time nor effort in making accurate informa- tion available; the Glens Falls Insurance Company permitted reproduction of historical paintings from its collection.

Mr. Robert N. King of the Glens Falls High School faculty provided much scientific material and checked the final text. Mr. Shelburne H. Fogg, County Agricultural Agent, Mr. Lloyd C. Garrison of the Niagara Hudson Company, the Reverend Edmund W. Twichell, and Mr. Joseph Keenan furnished information relating to farming, power development, and the growth of organized religious worship and education in Warren County. Mr. Herrick Osborne, County Superintendent of Highways, and Mr. Ernest L. H. Meyer, Superintendent of the Glens Falls Water Department, checked the maps of Warren County and Glens Falls.

The text was prepared by John H. Reardon and the staff of research and clerical workers, and Edward B. Davis, assisted by Miss Charlotte F. Walker and F. Lawrence Reagan. The photographs, except those other- wise credited, are by Paul A. Broady, the maps by Fred H. Champion, members of the staff of the Writers' Project.

The Board of Supervisors and the Advisory Committee have carefully reviewed the manuscripts, maps, and illustrations, and their suggestions, criticisms, and contributions have added greatly to the value of this book.

HENRY F. MALONE,

State Supervisor

Contents

PREFACE

GENERAL INFORMATION 15

CALENDAR OF ANNUAL EVENTS 17

Part I. The County

MOUNTAINS IN THE MAKING 2 1

THE MOUNTAINS OF TODAY 24

PLANT AND ANIMAL LIFE 27

RED MEN, WHITE MEN, AND BORDER WARFARE 3 5

FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR 41

REVOLUTION 72

GROWTH AND GOVERNMENT 99

INDUSTRY AND COMMERCE 113

CHURCH AND SCHOOL 126

Part II. Resort Towns and City Streets

GLENS FALLS 141

LAKE GEORGE 156

THE LAKE TOWNS — Queensbury, Caldwell, Bolton, Hague,

Horicon, Chester 162

THE RIVER TOWNS — Luzerne, Stony Creek, Thurman, Johnsburg,

Warrensburg 173

Part III. By Adirondack Hill and Dale

TOUR 1. Glens Falls to Schroon Lake, US 9 183

TOUR 2. Hague to Warren -Hamilton County Line, State 8 191

TOUR 3. Lake George to Ticonderoga, State 9N 195

TOUR 4. Warrensburg to North River (Warren-Hamilton County

Line), State 28 200

TOUR 5. Lake George to Glens Falls, State 9K 206

TOUR 6. Lake Luzerne to Warrensburg, State 418 209

TOUR 7. Glens Falls to Lake George, State 9L 211

Part IV. Sports and Recreation

ADIRONDACK RECREATIONLAND 217

GUIDES 220

HUNTING 221

FISHING 223

BATHING 226

BOATING 231

CAMPING 237

GOLFING 240

HIKING 242

WINTER SPORTS 246

Part V. Appendices

CHRONOLOGY 253

BIBLIOGRAPHY 257

INDEX 259

Illustrations

PANORAMA Between 30 and 33

Paradise Bay, Lake George Upper Hudson Valley, South of Glens Falls Potash Mountain Rises From a Plain Adirondack Highway in the August Sunshine The Sacandaga Spills Into the Hudson One of Numerous Evergreen Groves

HISTORY Between 94 and 97

Battle On Snowshoes

Death of Colonel Ephriam Williams, 1755 Montcalm Endeavors to Restrain His Indian Allies Colonists Man Guns at Battle of Lake George Abercromby Surveys His War Flotilla on Lake George, 1758 General Washington Visited Warren County in 1783 Rogers Slide Rescue of Major Israel Putnam near Glens Falls, 1758

INDUSTRY AND COMMERCE Between 110 and 113

Pulpwood Logs Enter the Paper Mill's Grinders Floated Down the Hudson, Pulpwood Is Stored in Huge Piles Pulpwood, In Paste Form, Is Processed Into Paper Garnet Mined Here Makes Fine Abrasives and Watch Jewels Portable Sawmill

At Spier Falls the Hudson Turns Huge Hydroelectric Generators The Glens Falls Feeder Winds Toward the Champlain Canal

CULTURE

Studio of Mme. Marcella Sembrich, Lake George Central School at Brant Lake Intermission, Barn Theater, Lake George Presbyterian Church, Glens Falls St. Mary's Academy, Glens Falls Grill Work Pattern, Church Interior

CITY AND VILLAGE

The Hudson Lights and Powers Glens Falls A Backdrop of Wooded Hills at Lake George Sail Boat Haven, Lake George Lake George's Shopping District City Park, Glens Falls Shopping District, Glens Falls Pottersville, Adirondack Summer Resort

Between 126 and 129

Between 148 and

ON TOUR

Between 200 and 203

Mill Stream On Its Way to the Hudson

The Hudson Skirts a Snow-crowned Hill

Adirondack Winter Road

The Bulwarks of Fort George Still Stand

Monument to Saint Isaac Jogues, Lake George Battleground State Park

Lake Champlain (L), Mount Defiance, Lake George

Lake George

Lake George Battleground State Park

Corral Talk

Brant Lake in the Mountains

Motor Ships Ply the Champlain Canal

Monument to Soldiers and Sailors, Glens Falls

PLAYTIME— SUMMER AND WINTER Between 228 and 231

Bridle Trails Abound

Camp Rotary, Lake George

Lightening Class Boats in a Breeze

Outboard Motorboating, Lake George

Tennis Match, Lake George Club

Practice Swing

Gilbert and Sullivan Opera, Summer Theater, Lake George

Caught in the Net

Lean-to Shelter in Adirondack State Park

They're Biting

Snow Train Brings City Sports Enthusiasts

Time Out for Rest

Gelandesprung

An Uphill Trail

Sulkies Race On the Ice, Lake George

Skating at Bolton Landing, Lake George

Skate Sailing

The Catch — Wolf, Fox and Hare

Northern Pike

Maps

CITY OF GLENS FALLS back pocket

WARREN COUNTY back pocket

General Information

Railroads: Delaware and Hudson (D & H) . Two branch lines, Saratoga Springs to North Creek, and Fort Edward to Lake George. Highways: One Federal Highway, US 9; five State Highways, 8,28, 9K, 9N, and 418. State police patrol highways. Bus Lines: Six inter-county systems:

1 . Champlain Coach Lines, New York to Montreal.

2. Adirondack Transit Lines, New York to Saranac Lake.

3. Hudson Transportation Co.-L. B. K. Lines, Glens Falls to Sara- toga and Albany.

4. Storm King Stage Corp., Glens Falls to Schuylerville.

5. Whitehall Autobus Co., Glens Falls to Whitehall and Rutland.

6. Corinth-Glens Falls Bus Line, Glens Falls to Luzerne and Corinth.

Three intra-county busses:

1 . Glens Falls to Lake Luzerne, Lake George, Assembly Point, War- rensburg, Chestertown and Pottersville.

2. Hague to Wevertown, North Creek, North River, and Thirteenth Lake.

3. In summer season, busses meet D & H trains at Riverside and provide transportation to Chestertown, Brant Lake, and Schroon Lake.

Waterways: Steamer (one way $1.50, round trip $2, car $3) through Lake George, June to September, from Lake George Village to Baldwin, with numerous stops on both sides of the lake and connecting with bus line for Ticonderoga.

Summer service by smaller boats from Lake George Village to interme- diate points on the lake.

Traffic Regulations: No turn on red signal except where a green arrow indicates that a right turn is permitted. On the open road, except where road signs indicate a speed limit, a safe speed is permissible without any fixed limit, but a speed "in excess of 40 miles an hour for a distance of one-fourth of a mile shall be presumptive evidence of a speed which is not careful or prudent." On mountain roads, caution signs at steep grades and curves should be heeded.

Accommodations: Adequate year-round hotels in larger communities. Hotels, cottages, tourist homes, cabins, adult and children's camps, farm homes, and dude ranches available in summer. Hotels, tourist homes, rooming houses at winter resorts. Total accommodations upwards of 10,000.

Climate: Winter temperatures sometimes reach 40° below zero at night, but there is usually a slight thaw in the midday sun. The daily normal

16 WARREN COUNTY GUIDE

maximum temperature in summer is 75 ° to 80°, a few degrees lower than New York City, and though the official thermometer occasionally goes above 90°, the forests, especially at high altitudes, are cooler, and the nights are cool.

Recreational Areas: Facilities for all outdoor sports (see Sports and Re- creation) are available in Warren County. Winter and summer resort programs include outdoor and indoor summer theaters, variety shows, band concerts, special dance orchestras, regattas, golf and tennis tourna- ments, baseball, horse and dog shows, water carnivals, and the like. Snow trains operate to North Creek and Lake George on weekends in winter when skiing conditions are favorable; snow and ice conditions are regu- larly announced by press and radio.

Hunting and Fishing: Forest, woodlot, and field supply big and small game; lakes, ponds, and streams offer good angling. State licenses are required. Size, limit of catch, and open season vary: an official syllabus of game laws is furnished with licenses. Bait, boats, equipment, and guides are available at most resort centers.

Licenses: Joint hunting and fishing for residents of New York State, $2.25; non-residents or aliens $10.50. Fishing license for non-residents or aliens $5.50. Non-residents' fishing license good for three consecutive days $2.75. Deer hunting special license, residents $1.25; non-residents or aliens $10.50. Licenses procurable from any county, city, or town clerk or village clerk in villages of 5,000 or more inhabitants by citizens of United States; aliens from Conservation Department, Albany, N. Y.

Fires: Forests are essential for outdoor recreation, because without trees, streams dry up and uncultivated land becomes a desert. To protect woodlands against fire, strict observance of these rules is necessary: ( 1 ) extinguish carefully burning matches, tobacco, and cigarettes, (2) clear away forest mold before building a camp fire, ( 3 ) be sure that your camp fire is dead before leaving it.

Dangerous Animals and Plants: The timber rattlesnake inhabits remote and wild areas. Unless surprised it generally gives warning with its rattle before striking. Black bear and wildcat, in less accessible and heavily timbered sections, do not attack unless wounded or cornered. Poison ivy, occasionally found in woodland and field, has been removed from most public recreation areas.

Information Bureaus: Chambers of Commerce of Glens Falls and Lake George open year round. Bolton Landing, Brant Lake, Chestertown- Pottersville, Hague, Lake Luzerne, North Creek, and Warrensburg Chambers of Commerce function in season. Roadside information booths at most resort villages during summer season.

Calendar of Annual Events

April	nfd
April	nfd
July	nfd
August	nfd
August	nfd
August	nfd
August	nfd
August	nfd
October	nfd
November	1-30

(nfd means no fixed date)

Semiannual Beagle Club trials, North Creek. Eastern States Basketball Tournament, Glens Falls. Italian Celebration Feast of St. Anne, Glens Falls. Sagamore Horse Show, Bolton Landing.

Dog Show, Mohawk Valley Kennel Club, Bolton Land- ing,

Sagamore Golf Tournament, Bolton Landing. Garden Club Flower Show, Glens Falls. Glens Falls Open Tennis Tournament, Glens Falls. Semiannual Beagle Club trials, North Creek. Deer hunting season, County-wide.

PART I The County

Mountains in the Making

A the dawn of geologic time, hundreds of millions of years ago, Warren County was part of the vast Grenville Sea. Dark, brood- ing, its waters stretched in utter loneliness from horizon to horizon. There was not a sign of life on the surface, although in the depths there may have been microscopic plants and animals, some perhaps with cal- careous or siliceous shells. For millions of years it remained thus, while there formed on the bed of that ocean a vast deposit of sediment miles in thickness, mud mixed with sand or lime and pressed into rock.

Then through the dark waters great masses of molten rock pushed upward, lifting and folding the ocean floor with irresistible force till it rose slowly above the surface. Thus were born the Adirondack Moun- tains, one of the first lands to emerge from the ancient Pre-Cambrian Ocean, their massive ramparts rising far higher than the Adirondacks of today. Wind and water at once began to wear them down and through aeons of time erosion reduced the whole region to a featureless, monot- onous peneplain.

Over these lowered land surfaces spread the Paleozoic seas, covering all of Warren County and leaving only the central Adirondacks as an island in a mighty ocean. Through periods measured in millions of years the waters ebbed and flowed over the region, leaving deposits that were gradually changed into today's sedimentary bedrock of limestone, shale, sandstone, and black marble. At last a titanic, mountain-building revolu- tion along the eastern edge of the United States pushed up the sediment of the ocean floor and folded it into mountain ranges. Most of Warren County became dry land, never again to sink beneath the invading waters. After more millions of years, during the Appalachian Mountain-building period, the rocks of Warren County and the Adirondacks were once more elevated and the present-day mountains and valleys began to take shape.

Rain, moisture, and winds again reduced the region to a land of low altitude. Over the vast plain rivers and streams wandered, crossing flood plain deposits to reach the ocean. Then came a new disturbance that lifted the plain two or three thousand feet over a long period of years. The sluggish rivers, changed into swift torrents, flowed souuhwestward with the dip of the earth, and followed faults or cracks in the peneplain to gouge out today's northeast-southwest valleys between the Adirondack ridges. Composed of hard rocks that resisted erosion, the mountains stood out prominently as these violent streams slashed away the softer strata of the valleys.

22 WARREN COUNTY GUIDE

Throughout these long periods of geologic change, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and fur-bearing animals like those we know today were slowly evolving. Simultaneously appeared the higher groups of water plants, mosses, ferns, seed-bearing plants, and modern trees, but for a relatively complete record of this evolutionary process the scientist must look else- where. In Warren County the traces of only the early forms of life are preserved in the rocks.

Following the elevation of this region the climate in these latitudes became cold. From the north a great sheet of ice, the Labrador Glacier, moved over Warren County and continued southward, sweeping plant and animal life before it. A mile or two thick, it flowed over even the highest mountains. As the ice sheet advanced, it scraped off the sharp peaks of Warren County's mountain ridges, leaving graceful, flowing contours; it broadened and deepened valleys, and left great masses of glacial deposit rising above the plains. In its retreat the glacier left rubble and debris that dammed up preglacial valleys to create Lake George, Schroon Lake, and others. Great blocks of ice, buried in mud, sometimes at high elevations, melted to form Lake Luzerne, Glen Lake, Lake Sunny- side, and many other ponds or small lakes. Boulders, large and small, were scattered over the countryside. The course of the Hudson River was changed; waterfalls and gorges were born.

The tremendous weight of ice depressed much of New York State below sea level, and the Hudson -Lake George -Lake Champlain Valley was invaded by salt water from both north and south. The upper Hud- son, where it entered this inland sea, built a great delta of sand and mud, now the broad plain at Glens Falls and a few miles to the north and west. Evidence of this marine invasion can be seen in the terraces washed by the waves at its shore line on the Palmertown and Luzerne Mountains, west of Glens Falls.

For at least half a million years the ice covered Warren County, twenty times as long as the relatively brief period of about 25,000 years from the final retreat of the ice cap to the present day. Since the glacial period, the topography has undergone little change. The land, while it was being relieved of its burden of ice, rose again, with greater elevation toward the north. Thus the highest mountains of Warren County, Gore, Puffer, and Eleventh, are toward the northwest. Indeed the adjustments below the surface incident to this rise are not fully made even now. Late in 1940 and in 1941 Warren County experienced a series of slight earthquake shocks, centered not far away in New Hampshire, as subterranean masses of rock slipped along cracks or faults where pressure brought about slight

WARREN COUNTY GUIDE 23

readjustments. But earthquakes are only minor incidents in a process of change so gradual that we are not conscious that it is going on daily without interruption.

Some of the present-day surface rocks, originally deposited on the floor of the first ocean, are the oldest known strata in the world — Grenville sediments altered into white limestones, gneisses, and schists, rocks greatly changed by heat and pressure. The molten or igneous rocks, which invaded the floor of the Grenville Sea, now form the mountains of Warren County. Harder than the ancient sedimentary rocks, they consist prin- cipally of granite, anorthosite, syenite, and gabbro.

Despite the variety of minerals present in the County few are extracted for use in modern industry. Feldspar has been mined near Luzerne, graph- ite near Hague, and iron in several places. Today, only garnet, extracted at Gore Mountain near North Creek, and limestone, quarried at various places throughout the County, and used for road building and concrete work, are of commercial importance.

Fertile soil, never too plentiful in Warren County, is thinner than ever on upland slopes because of erosion following the lumberman's ax and forest fires. The whole region, except for a sandy plain at the extreme southeastern tip, is mountainous. Products of rock disintegration washed into the narrow valleys are soon carried away by streams or are received as lake deposits.

Topsoil, averaging five to eight inches, consists principally of sand and sandy loam. The blue-black muck, in drained swamps on the eastern edge of Glens Falls, is useful for growing celery and onions; and a swampy area at the head of Glen Lake contains peat deposits which for a short time were worked as a source of fuel.

The level country just north of Glens Falls, once covered with lofty white pine, grew up to scrub pine after the virgin forest had been fed to the sawmills. For a long time this area was treated as wasteland and even now is not useful for farms. However, a large part of it, the Glens Falls watershed, and some other nearby areas, have been reforested. Trees adapted to the type of soil have been selected and, though still young, give promise of developing into a healthy new woodland.

The Mountains of Today

WARREN COUNTY, an 876-square-mile area in the north- eastern part of New York State, once a part of Washington County, became a separate entity on March 12, 1813. Named for General Joseph Warren, who was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill, it embraces eleven towns under the government of a sixteen-member Board of Supervisors, one from each town and five from the city of Glens Falls.

Except for the region surrounding Glens Falls, Warren County lies wholly within the five-million-acre Adirondack State Park, the largest in the United States. Across it, from northeast to southwest, run four mountain ranges, the Luzerne, Kayaderosseras, Schroon, and Boquet.

Glens Falls and its environs spread over a strikingly level, sandy plateau (400 alt.), but to the north and west the almost continuous mountain ranges, three to fifteen miles apart, give the country a rugged aspect. Isolated peaks and jutting spurs, such as Potash Mountain (1,680 alt.), near Lake Luzerne, and French Mountain (1,522 alt.) , at the head of Lake George, take up much of the land between the ranges. However, the rounded crests of the mountains, softened by a covering of forest verdure, give the skyline a gracefully flowing contour.

Paralleling the mountain ranges, and occasionally cutting through them, are picturesque valleys, some broad and pastoral, others wild and deep, but all infinitely varied in scenery — open fields and dense forest, winding river, clear lake, and quiet pond.

In the southernmost valley between the Luzerne and Kayaderosseras Mountains, only a low divide separates the headwaters of Lake George from the sources of a chain of ponds and lakes, including Vanare, Forest, and Allure, which feed Lake Luzerne; this in turn empties its waters into the Hudson River. Through a narrower valley with steep wooded sides, a mere gap in the mountains, the main highway, US 9, follows a stream from Lake George Village northwest up an easy grade to Warrens- burg on the Schroon River, near where the latter stream joins the Hudson.

The next valley, following the general trend, forms a triangle with the two just described. It extends from the open country around Luzerne up the narrow gorge of the Hudson to Warrensburg, where it spreads out to include the Schroon Valley, one of the most extensive and fertile farm areas in the County. At Horicon the outlet of Brant Lake enters the Schroon Valley from the east, and a few miles beyond lies the southern

WARREN COUNTY GUIDE 25

end of mountain-hemmed Schroon Lake, the northern boundary of the valley.

The large streams that drain most of the County — the Hudson and its tributaries, the Schroon and East Branch Sacandaga — flow south. The rest of the County drains into Lake George and Lake Champlain, whose waters flow north into the St. Lawrence River. The Lake George basin is so narrow that rainfall a short distance west of its shores reaches the ocean a thousand miles farther south, by way of the Hudson. Glens Falls rises steeply from the banks of the Hudson, but most of the sandy plateau upon which it is built drains toward Lake George and Lake Champlain.

The upper Hudson River is swift; it drops almost a thousand feet in the fifty miles it travels from the Essex County line south across Warren County and, in a sweeping arc, east to Glens Falls. Up from Corinth the Adirondack branch of the Delaware and Hudson Railroad and a state highway follow the river through its deeply cut, rugged valley, which at times narrows to a ravine flanked by peaks that rise precipitously to a height of 1,500 feet above the stream. The railway stops at North Creek, but the highway continues into Essex County.

West of the Hudson River in Warren County the mountains are higher, the valleys narrower, the villages smaller and fewer, and there are large areas reached only by woodland trails. Indeed only one through highway, State 8, crosses the 2 5 -mile western boundary line into Ham- ilton County. Gore Mountain towers to a height of 3,595 feet and there are many lakes and ponds of glacial origin, several at an altitude of more than 2,000 feet. The streams that do not drain directly into the Hudson River help feed the Sacandaga Reservoir, which controls floods and main- tains a steady flow into the Hudson River during dry seasons.

Lake George, the largest body of water in the Adirondacks, dotted with many islands, lies almost wholly in Warren County. Occupying one of the deepest basins in the State, its surface, only 323 feet above sea level, looks up to mountain heights of over 2,500 feet. Prospect Mountain (2,021 alt.) and Tongue Mountain (2,258 alt.) tower conspicuously above the Warren County shore, while even more imposing peaks rise from the east side, Black Mountain in Washington County (2,665 alt.) being the tallest sentinel.

Schroon Lake (807 alt.) , which juts into the County from the north, is more than nine miles long and averages about a mile in width. Brant Lake (801 alt.) , a few miles to the southeast, measures six miles long and a half mile wide.

26 WARREN COUNTY GUIDE

Not far away is Loon Lake (866 alt.) an irregular triangle that affords a vista of more than two miles across its surface, and just south of that is Friends Lake (915 alt.), only a little smaller.

In the northwest corner of the County, Thirteenth Lake (1,674 alt.) lies nestled among tall peaks. In the southwest corner is Harrisburg Lake (1,494 alt.) , two miles long, lying at the end of the road that climbs up a narrow valley from Stony Creek. In the southern projection of the County, Lake Luzerne (624 alt.), a mile long and half a mile wide, lies close to the Hudson River. All of these and many smaller lakes and ponds are reached by good roads, but there are scores of others that can be approached only by woodland trails or bridle paths.

Warren County is subject to wide extremes of temperature varying from about 40° below zero in the coldest winter nights to a 37-year record high of 101° at Glens Falls in summer. The nights are usually cool even during July and August. Light frosts have been known as late as June 20, and as early as August 26, but killing frosts seldom come after the middle of May or before late September. The mean annual temperature varies from 46° in the southern part to 43 ° along the moun- tainous boundary as compared with 52° to 53° for New York City. The growing season for crops varies widely in different parts of the county. In the Glens Falls area there is an average of 151 days without frost; at Lake George, 140 days; and at North Creek, only 134 days.

The annual precipitation over the southern slopes of the Adirondack Mountains, including Warren County, is about 35 to 39 inches, higher toward the north; but during June, July, and August there are compara- tively few rainy or cloudy days, though there are occasional severe elec- trical storms. In early spring and autumn there are likely to be cloudy days and chilly evening fogs. Winter snow fall, with a yearly average of 68 to 75 inches, is heavier at the higher altitudes and in the northern part of the County. It varies from year to year, but there is usually snow for winter sports in the mountains for several months, and some winters bring deep snow to the valleys and the Queensbury plain. Except at high altitudes and on a few exceptionally cold days, there is usually a slight thaw daily in the early afternoon sun, but those unaccustomed to such low temperatures as occur even in the bright early morning sunshine must be especially careful to protect ears, hands, and feet, wear warm clothing, and keep active while out of doors.

Plant and Animal Life

WITH its forests, dells, and hills, Warren County presents a wide variety of trees, plants, shrubbery, and wild flowers. Most of the plants grow at every level from the valleys to the highest summit, although, in some sections, hardwoods inhabit the hollows and lower slopes, while evergreens grow toward the mountain tops. On the highest peaks a few alpine plants are found. On rocky summits where the soil is thin and moisture drains rapidly away, the forest trees are fre- quently dwarfed into a scrub growth, gnarled and twisted by the wind.

In the days when lumbering was "big business" the county was cut over from two to four times. Today the forest has been restored to such an extent that, while it is generally less dense, and the trees are compara- tively young, it approaches in area its original extent. Even in the farming sections there are extensive woodlots and in many places trees and bushes are encroaching step by step on pasture and meadow.

Warren County forestland is under State protection with much of it reserved as a part of the Adirondack Park, a vast public domain, open for the free use of the people as a health and pleasure resort, and as a source of timber and water supply. In line with this policy the State, the County and the City of Glens Falls have reforested several regions with pine and spruce. One of these is the Theodore Roosevelt Forest, established by the State near North Creek in 1926, along a part of the route which Mr. Roosevelt was traveling when he became President of the United States on September 14, 1901. The Charles Lathrop Pack Demonstration Forest, north of Warrensburg, 2,200 acres of pines and hardwoods, serves as an outdoor classroom for students of the New York State College of Forestry. Its purpose is to show that trees can be grown as a continuous crop by harvesting the ripe timber without disturbing the younger growth. Wherever space permits varieties suited to the soil and climate are planted to replace mature trees that have been cut before they begin to deteriorate.

White pine, an abundant and valuable tree in the old logging days, is still the predominant species in the County, while hemlock, red spruce and balsam are also plentiful. In low, damp areas black spruce and white spruce are widely scattered. Among the introduced species, Norway spruce and European larch have been extensively planted in reforestation plots.

The trembling aspen is important as temporary ground cover on burned acreages. It is quick-growing but short-lived, and other trees soon replace

28 WARREN COUNTY GUIDE

it. The common juniper and the shining willow, while not abundant, are distributed over much of the County. Pitch pine is plentiful in the low- lands, whereas red pine grows in clumps on low hills. The jack pine is found in sandy, barren soils that will not support larger trees.

Of the hardwoods the most abundant and valuable are sugar maple, yellow birch, beech, white ash, and white birch. The American elm graces roadsides, hedgerows, and fields in farming country and adorns the street of hamlets and towns. The residential sections of villages have magnifi- cent old elms to shade their parks and homes. Another ornamental tree, the mountain ash, which has attractive white flowers and red berries, grows in only a few areas. Other varieties commonly distributed through- out the County are red maple, scrub oak, grey birch, striped maple, and mountain maple.

The plant life of the Adirondacks is impressive in its diversity. Moun- tainside, swamp, meadow, and sand plain — each has its typical flowers, shrubs, mosses, and ferns. On the forest floor rich green mosses, pale lichens, and delicate flowering plants abound; in wet places peat mosses and club mosses thrive. There are wintergreens and sometimes a deep resilient carpet of the smaller partridge berry. White Cladonia and yellow buellia lichen grow from the cracks of blackened rocks, while reindeer moss and Iceland moss appear among the non-flowering types of ghostly lichens.

The delicate maidenhair, the large bracken, the cinnamon fern, the interrupted fern, the polypody, the marginal shield ferns and the small royal ferns thrive on the rich moist floor of dense lowland forests.

Slender white Greenland sandwort abounds high in the mountains, and yellow mountain goldenrod grows among the balsam. Together with the reddish-striped wood sorrel, dwarf dogwood, and mountain aster, they lend color and beauty to the uplands.

Even before the last snow has been piled in drifts by the March winds, the pussywillows send out their furry buds, while along woodland brooks and in the marshes the skunk cabbage, first flower of spring, soon appears. Snow still lies in the fence corners and shaded hollows when the fragrant trailing arbutus opens its pink flowers close to the ground among last year's leaves. Yellow violets, first of the numerous violet tribe, nestle close to the forest floor in the chilly days of early spring with hepatica, bloodroot, anemone, and a host of others. Only a little later the swamps are ablaze with cowslip or marsh marigold. On the hillsides a few brilliant pink azaleas bloom.

Dogwood and chokecherry in the early spring are the most conspicuous wild flowering trees on wooded hills and along the roadsides. Although

WARREN COUNTY GUIDE 29

not plentiful, cherry, pear, and apple blossoms add their color. Alder, elderberry, shadbush, and red osier contrast with the delicate greens of the opening buds and tender leaves of willow, tamarack, and other marsh- land trees and bushes.

In early summer the open fields are bright with dandelion, patches of bluets, daisy, buttercup, clover, blackeyed Susan, devil's paintbrush, blue lupine, and other flowers familiar in the landscape of New York and New England. Meanwhile in the woods columbine, trillium, saxifrage, Indian pipe, jack-in- the-pulpit, and Solomon's seal appear.

In the less frequented forests are found wild orchids. These moccasin flowers or lady slippers, pink or yellow, rise on single stalks from clusters of leaves. Another variety, in swampy woods, has a tall leafy stem bear- ing several blooms of white splashed with bright red. In the swamps and the marshy edges of ponds, or in and along running streams are horsetail, cattail, hellebore, boneset, cardinal flower, and water cress.

There are at least two insect-eating plants: the sundew, and the pitcher plant, into whose leafy receptacles, half full of water, the unsuspecting insect crawls from the inviting lip of the pitcher only to find his egress barred by bristly hairs pointing downward. In early spring the pitcher plant flower opens a bright purple, green, and yellow rosette on a tall, slender, green stalk.

The spring pastel shades that later flare into the flaming colors of summer give way as winter approaches to the more subdued browns, blues, purples, and grays. In the woodlands, hardy goldenrods, asters and wintergreens are among the last to fade; in the meadows and fields, as milkweed silk drifts in the autumn air, asters, gentians and goldenrods make their last stand; in swamps the ferns and cattails linger on.

Cultivated flowers are for the most part those especially dependent on sandy soil. Among the shrubs capable of surviving, the early yellow forsythia, pink flowering almond, and lilac are the first to bloom in the spring. The crocus, bleeding heart, lily-of-the-valley, peony, marigold, calendula, larkspur, delphinium, dahlia, rose, pansy, tulip, daffodil, chrysanthemum, cosmos, and aster are grown in "warren County gardens and flower beds.

Some gardeners specialize in wild flower or formal gardens, or in special varieties of plants. The gardens of Robert J. McMullen, Glens Falls, open in the spring to visitors, are well known for their tulips.

All types of covert — mountain wilderness, open woodland, farmland, swamps, lakes, and streams — afford refuge for a great variety of mam- mal, bird, fish, and insect life in Warren County. Indeed the opening of

30 WARREN COUNTY GUIDE

the big woods by lumbermen has made conditions today more favorable for most species of wild life than the primeval forest. True, the wild turkey, the heath hen, the passenger pigeon, and the moose are gone, and some fur bearers are almost extinct; but the modern gun, trap, and auto- mobile have been the cause, rather than lack of suitable habitat.

The largest wild animals in the County, the white-tailed deer and the Eastern black bear, are natives of the woodlands. Ambling bruin, unless cornered or wounded, is more frightened than the hunter who suddenly comes upon him gorging in a berry patch. Deer provide a major sport and their abundance in "Warren County is indicated by the fact that 384 were bagged in the one-month open season in 1939 and 3 5 1 in 1940.

That fierce predator of pioneer days, the timber wolf, is today only a memory, but a smaller relative, the brush wolf or timber coyote, a migrant from the West, is spreading through the Adirondacks. A few have been killed in the deep woods near Brant Lake. Wildcats, once thought to be wiped out, are also returning to the County for they have been seen near North Creek. The fisher and marten, hunted for their valuable pelts, are gone; the otter, until late years almost extinct, is re- turning, but is none too popular with fishermen because of his fondness for trout.

The varying hare or snowshoe rabbit, another of the fur-bearing species, which has periodically increased and declined, is today holding his own and even shows a tendency to multiply with the growth of more spruce and pine, his natural coverts. Mink, red fox, and grey fox are reported as abundant as in early times. The grey fox is said to be extending his range northward and accommodating the breeding season to the more rigorous climate.

The beaver, almost exterminated by 1900, has become so plentiful under protective legislation as to invade farms, where he occasionally be- comes a nuisance with dams that flood fields and roadways. In 1940 an open season was declared and 69 Warren County trappers bagged 146 beavers for a profit of more than $2,500.

Birds of many species haunt the County's woodlands. The shrill cry of the blue jay may sometimes be heard warning the partridge and deer of the approach of a hunter. From tree tops drifts the clear whistle of the hidden wood pewee or the varied call of the red-eyed vireo, while down on the forest floor the ovenbird screams his repetitious "teacher — teacher." The delicate trilling of the black-throated blue warbler, chest- nut-sided warbler, black and white warbler, and the redstart comes from protected woodlands, and also the calls of the downy or red-headed wood- pecker, pine grosbeak, flicker, and chickadee.

Panorama

I

PARADISE BAY, LAKE GEORGE

by John J. Vrooman

ADIRONDACK HIGHWAY IN THE AUGUST SUNSHINE

THE SACANDAGA SPILLS INTO THE HUDSON

UPPER HUDSON VALLEY, SOUTH OF GLENS FALLS

Photo by John J. Vroom<

POTASH MOUNTAIN RISES FROM A PLAIN

STATELY PINES, PACK DEMONSTRATION NEAR WARR E NSB U RG

FOREST

WARREN COUNTY GUIDE 33

Many insect families add their undertone to the sounds of the woods — the rasping buzz of the cicada, the low humming in their brief season of swarms of the "no-see-ums," punkies, deer flies, black flies, and sand flies. Evidences of the harmful work of the pine weevil and the tent caterpillar may be seen where they have attacked trees in forest, field, and village.

The timber rattlesnake ranks as the most dangerous reptile in the County, but is not plentiful and usually holes up in the most inaccessible mountainous regions. The hognose snake, the black snake, and the garter snake, common in the woodlands, are non-venomous.

The stirrings of the birds and beasts and the sounds of animals that prowl at night make darkness in the big woods a bit awesome for the rookie hunter, hiker, or angler. The maniacal laughter of the loon, the hoot of the screech owl and the great horned owl, the chattering of the little brown bat and the chimney swift, the croaking of frogs, the scream- ing of night hawks, the rustling of such numerous little beasts as the Canadian white-footed mouse and the masked shrew, the ghostly passage of deer, bear, fox, and weasel, and the clatter of the noisy porcupine are some of the sounds that excite the imagination in the forest night.

Like the woodlands, the lakes, streams, and swamps of Warren County have their characteristic fauna. Brook trout, lake trout, bass, pike, pick- erel, pikeperch, and bullheads respond to the angler's lure in a variety of fishing waters. In swamps and ponds the brown-shelled mud turtle, the orange-trimmed painted turtle, the yellow spotted turtle, the dark- colored wood turtle, and the moss-backed snapping turtle, the only edible species, are common. Along the shores and among the cattails are hidden the spring peeper or tree frog, the wood frog, and the toad, the eft, the red newt, and the spotted salamander, the crayfish, and the harmless water snake.

High over swampy areas wheel blackbirds, bitterns, great blue herons, and marsh hawks, while deep in the rushes swamp sparrows, Maryland yellow throats, and marsh wrens nest. The kingfisher, poised for diving, hovers above lakes, and migratory woodcocks and black ducks, scarce a few years ago, now rest frequently on the waters. Among the reeds and grasses swarm caddis flies, dragon flies, damsel flies, and Dobson flies, the larvae of which are sought as bait by fishermen. Around lakes and ponds fish flies or May flies make a brief appearance.

In woodlot and farm the skunk and raccoon are estimated to be more numerous today than when Henry Hudson sailed up the river that now bears his name. Muskrats are not plentiful, but the cottontail rabbit, once found only on Long Island and in the lower Hudson Valley, has followed the settler's ax, plow, and cabbage patch into all parts of

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Warren County. The red and the grey squirrel, woodchuck, and chip- munk, as well as the porcupine, are common everywhere, except in the heavy timber.

An outlaw occasionally encountered in fields adjacent to woodlands is the European hare, sometimes called by hunters the Texas jackrabbit, an animal which may weigh up to 1 8 pounds. Neither released nor protected by the Conservation Department, this hare has drifted into the Adiron- dacks from other regions of the State. Such good hunting does he provide that sportsmen have made requests for his propagation.

The native pheasant, which remains in the County the year around, is not plentiful but still survives. Fed by the Conservation Department and by local fish and game clubs, they provide good hunting in the short open season. The quail, almost extinct, is being propagated but suffers from lack of proper covert.

Field, meadow, and orchard birds inhabit Warren County in great variety. Frequently heard is the high, shrill voice of the meadowlark, the call of the field sparrow who teasingly draws attention to himself but is rarely seen, the warbling of the bobolink, the singing of the brown thrasher; and the imitations of the catbird. The close observer may dis- cover a flicker searching the ground for ants, a fierce kingbird catching insects from a high branch or engaging a hawk in combat, and crows, in the daytime, pestering sun-blinded owls. In garden and orchard, on fence post and bush, may be seen the chicory-eating goldfinch, the brilliantly garbed bluebird and Baltimore oriole, the white-breasted nuthatch and the little wren.

Color and motion is added to the fields and meadows by many kinds of insects. Prominent are the monarch, swallowtail, and cabbage butterflies, grasshoppers that leap ahead as you walk, ladybugs, the cucumber, tiger, and soldier beetles, and other varieties too numerous to list. Ants may invade your picnic lunch if you trespass on their hills and bees or wasps will protect their store of food if their homes are invaded, and mosquitoes are troublesome in the spring, especially near woods or swamps.

Night over the open country brings its own activity and sound. Moths — luna, cecropia, sphinx, polyphemus — dash against lighted windows, fireflies flash pinpoints of brilliance, frogs croak, and katydids and crickets utter their insistent chirp.

Red Men, White Men, and Border Warfare

MORE than two centuries before white men settled in Warren County contending forces were at work upon the fate of North America. Bitter warfare between the Algonkian population and the invading Iroquoian tribes was deciding which of these great racial groups should occupy the Upper Hudson, and engendering hatreds that echoed all through the bloody struggle between Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Americans for possession of a new empire.

Long years before Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence in 1534, the Algonkian tribes were lighting their council fires at Pem-pot-a-wut-hut, the Fire Place of the Nation, on land where their paleface brothers have since built a city called Albany. Various tribes of this stock, including the Pequots, Narragansetts, and Mahicans, spread out through present- day New York and New England.

The Mahicans then held northeastern New York, built summer en- campments on Lake George, Lake Champlain, and the Hudson River, and sought game in the vast stretches of the great beaver hunting country, that highland wilderness now known as the Adirondacks. Across Warren County and the mountains beyond wound the trails of the Indians. Later these became the wood roads of the pioneer and the modern highways of today.

Warren County, a wild, almost inaccessible region of forbidding win- ters, was also disputed border territory. It was the scene of much fighting between hostile Indians, which seems to justify the historical conclusion that it was never a place of permanent abode for the aborigines. The remains of stone implements, bits of pottery, pipes, arrow-heads, and spear-heads, found at Dunham's and Northwest Bays on Lake George, at Harrisena, Round Lake, Glen Lake, and at the Big Bend in the Hudson above Glens Falls, indicate at least brief Indian encampments.

About the beginning of the fourteenth century the pleasant lands of the relatively mild-mannered Mahicans were invaded by a warlike race from the west, the Iroquois. For a time the newcomers were only another group among the large number of Algonkian tribes. Then, toward the latter part of the sixteenth century, they formed the League of the Five Nations. Possessing a key position geographically, they began to drive out, subdue, assimilate, or exterminate their Algonkian neighbors. At

36 WARREN COUNTY GUIDE

last, utterly broken, the Mahicans retreated into New England. The Schaghticokes, by leave of their Iroquois masters, lived in subjection and were allowed to extend their hunting grounds to the shores of Lake George. The Hurons, Ottawas, Pequots, Abenakis, and other tribes, were scattered and pushed relentlessly northward to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. The Algonkians along the lower reaches of this stream were derisively dubbed Adirondacks, Tree-eaters, by their con- querors. Thus they continued to foster a deadly hatred for the Five Nations who had reduced them, a race of successful hunters and warriors, to the necessity of existing for a time on herbs, bark, tree buds, and roots.

This hatred between two great Indian groups provided motive and plot for the first act of a bloody drama of conquest as Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635), French explorer, sailed up the St. Lawrence in 1608 to found a permanent settlement at Quebec. From the Indians he heard wondrous tales of Caniaderiguarunte, "the lake that is part of another lake." They agreed to guide him to the fabulous waters if he in turn would use his "firestick" to help them defeat any war party of Iroquois met on the way.

On July 4, 1609, Champlain and two of his companions with sixty Hurons and Algonkians under their chiefs, Yroquet and Ochastequin, entered the great lake to which Champlain gave his name. Impressed by the magnificent vistas of mountain, forest, and field, he paddled south- ward with his white companions and dusky allies. On the evening of July 29, he encountered near Ticonderoga a strong raiding party of about two hundred Iroquois warriors.

Battle lines were drawn, and the morning of July 30, 1609, saw a wilderness encounter which did much to decide the future of America. Champlain posted the other two white men with their firearms on his left flank, while he stood surrounded in the center of his red allies. When they advanced to within thirty paces of the Iroquois, the Algonkian ranks opened and the white adventurer leveled his arquebus. At the first shot, two enemy chiefs fell dead and another was mortally wounded.

At the same time Champlain's companions opened fire from the flank. Appalled at the firestick whose thunder brought death, the Iroquois fled in utter rout. It was a defeat they neither forgot nor forgave. This deadly hatred of the French, a hatred translated into continual harassment of the settlements of France along the St. Lawrence, incited much of the action in the second act of the drama of empire, the growth of the Dutch and English colonies in New York and New England.

In September of that same year, 1609, Henry Hudson (P-1611), ex- plorer and navigator in the service of the Dutch East India Company,

WARREN COUNTY GUIDE 37

sailed his little vessel, the Half Moon, up the river that has been given his name. He reached the head of navigation a few weeks after Champlain had fought the Iroquois at Ticonderoga only a hundred miles away to the north. Thus early did white explorers approach Warren County from both north and south. Before long, Dutch, English, and French traders and soldiers, following Indian trails far and wide, penetrated its territory, but it was not until a century and a half later that peaceful settlers began to clear the forest, build homes, and plant crops.

Meanwhile war parties and armies swept up and down Lake George to wreak havoc and destruction, plunder and pillage, and to carry away prisoners. The struggle between France and England for colonial empire kept alive the fires of hate and vengeance while both sides strove to win profit in the fur trade and to gain the military support of the powerful Iroquois Five Nations, of whom the warlike Mohawks were nearest to Warren County.

The Iroquois lived in long houses built of poles and bark. Rarely did the "long house" hold only a single family. Though it had entrances only at each end, it usually had compartments for many families, and often stretched out to a length of 200 feet, or even more. The Five Nations referred figuratively to their home territory, stretching across what is now New York State from Lake Erie to the Hudson River at Albany, as their Long House, and the Mohawks were called Keepers of the Eastern Door.

In 1642, a Mohawk war party captured three Jesuit missionaries and a group of their Huron converts on the St. Lawrence River. These they tortured and brought captive down Lake Champlain to their villages. Of the three Jesuits, Brother Rene Goupil was killed, while Brother Guil- laume Couture, exchanged for a Mohawk captive, left the order. After a year of incredible suffering, Father Isaac Jogues, the Jesuit leader, with the aid of the Dutch at Albany, escaped and sailed for France. There he was highly honored, and the Pope, calling him a "Martyr of Christ," granted a special dispensation permitting him to perform the sacrament of the Mass in spite of his terribly mutilated hands. Father Bressani, an Italian Jesuit, was captured two years later by a Mohawk war party on the St. Lawrence, received similar treatment, but was ransomed more promptly by the Dutch.

Father Jogues, having returned to Canada, was sent in 1646 to confirm a peace treaty with the Mohawks. He chose the route over the Ticon- deroga portage to Lake George, and on the eve of the feast of Corpus Christi, transported by the sight of that beautiful lake, he named it Lake St. Sacrament in honor of the day. There is no record that any white man had seen the lake before Father Jogues.

38 WARREN COUNTY GUIDE

The Mohawks now received him hospitably, and he returned to Canada promptly to report that the treaty bound only the Mohawks to keep peace with the French. It did not protect the Hurons and other Algon- kian allies of the French from attack by the Mohawks and was not binding upon the rest of the Iroquois Five Nations. Nevertheless, Father Jogues returned later in the summer with a lay brother named John Lalande and a few Hurons to found a mission among the Mohawks.

As the party approached the Mohawk villages, they were seized as captives. One faction, the Bear clan, desiring war, wanted to kill them, and accomplished their purpose by luring first Father Jogues, and the next day Lalande, into their huts to tomahawk them. Along the path by which the missionaries had entered the village their heads were set up on poles.

At Auriesville, just west of Amsterdam on the south shore of the Mohawk River, there is a shrine to commemorate this first attempt to found a mission among the Mohawks. Later efforts to convert the west- ern tribes of the Five Nations were only a little more successful, since the Iroquois remained for the most part loyal to the British and were hostile to French priests.

By act of Pope Pius XI, Father Jogues, Rene Goupil, and John Lalande were beatified June 21, 1925, and canonized June 29, 1930, three of the first eight North American saints. At Lake George Village the State of New York has erected a monument with a heroic bronze statue of St. Jogues at the place where he left Lake St. Sacrament on his fatal journey. That was the name of the lake for more than a century until William Johnson named it for the king who afterward rewarded him with gifts, high office, and a title of nobility.

A charter granted by Charles II to his brother James, Duke of York and Albany, in 1664 resulted in the seizure of New Netherlands by the Brit- ish, to whom it was finally ceded ten years later. Colonial wars between French and British were largely motivated by European disputes, and American boundaries were set by treaties between European monarchs. Of the many expeditions that passed through Warren County, up and down Lake St. Sacrament, or around it by way of the Great Carry be- tween the upper Hudson River and Wood Creek, the marshy headwaters of Lake Champlain, a few may be listed.

In 1689 Count Frontenac's plan to invade the British Colonies by the Lake Champlain route and destroy them, beginning with Albany, was frustrated by the Iroquois, who had ravaged and destroyed all the French settlements except Montreal. On his arrival from France, Frontenac found the surviving French provincials prostrate with fear and lacking

WARREN COUNTY GUIDE 39

supplies, but he still felt obliged to impress his Indian allies by a prompt reprisal. In January 1690, he sent a party of Frenchmen and Algonkians, 250 strong, to attack Albany. Nearly exhausted and groping their way through a violent snow storm they arrived before Schenectady late at night on February 8. Amazed to find the colony unguarded they sur- rounded the houses and woke the inhabitants with war cries. More than half the settlers were killed or captured, and the raiders retreated to Canada laden with booty.

Enraged by this act, Governor Leisler of the Province of New York called the first Colonial Congress ever assembled in America, and it met in April. The outcome was a punitive expedition of 800 men from New York and Connecticut under Major General Fitz John Winthrop, which assembled in Albany and moved as far as Hautkill (Whitehall) at the southern end of Lake Champlain. When Winthrop learned that he would not be supported by the expected Massachusetts contingent, that he would receive no further supplies from Albany, and that his Iroquois were sending but seventy braves, he ordered his expedition to face about and return to Albany. A detachment of 150 men, including Indians, proceeded up Lake Champlain. Led by Captain John Schuyler they made a successful raid on the French fort at LaPrairie, but they were too few to attempt an attack on Montreal just across the St. Lawrence.

The next summer, Colonel Peter Schuyler, John's brother, renewed the attack on Fort LaPrairie. Though he is generally credited with a victory over the French forces led by Valrenne, there was no decisive result.

In 1693, after a large French force had destroyed the Mohawk villages, Peter Schuyler pursued them and harassed their retreat.

In 1696 Frontenac personally led an expedition that destroyed the crops and castles of the Onondagas, an Iroquois nation south of Oswego on Lake Ontario, and they sued for peace. Meanwhile England in 1697 concluded the treaty of Ryswick with France.

But in 1702, with the mother countries once more in armed conflict, Queen Anne's War began in America. An expedition under Colonel Francis Nicholson marched out of Albany in 1709 for an attack on Montreal, supported by a fleet which was to sail up the coast of Canada. Advancing through the wilderness along the Hudson, Nicholson built a military road from Fort Saratoga (Schuylerville) to Fort Schuyler (Fort Ann) , erecting fortifications along the way which he called Fort Miller and Fort Nicholson (Fort Edward) . This was as far as he went; on receipt of news that the fleet had failed to carry out its part, he returned to Albany. In 1711, Nicholson, now a general, led another expedition over the same route but met with like reverses.

40 WARREN COUNTY GUIDE

The campaigning ended in 1713 with the Treaty of Utrecht. The French, making good use of the lull in hostilities that followed to push forward a program of colonial expansion, built Fort St. Frederic at Crown Point in 1731, on land once occupied by an English trading post. It was thereafter regarded by the northern colonies as a bared sword pointed at their heart because Lake George provided a highway across the wilder- ness to the English settlements and Mohawk villages. Peace, however, continued until King George's War opened with the burning and massacre of Old Fort Saratoga by the French and Indians under Marin on Novem- ber 17, 1745. Savage but indecisive border raids followed for several years, until 1748 brought the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.

It was a powder-keg peace. The French, at least, never stopped pre- paring for the final sanguinary chapter of conflict for the New World empire. While both sides were striving to win more Indian allies, the shrewd diplomats of the Five Nations had long maneuvered to maintain a balance of power they could control. Perhaps they foresaw that the triumph of one faction of the whites would spell their doom.

French and Indian War

DURING the French and Indian War the largest armies traversed what is now Warren County, the most exciting and colorful scouting raids and skirmishes occurred in this region, the most extensive military roads, stockaded posts, and forts were built here, the largest flotillas sailed upon Lake George, and some of the bloodiest battles were fought on Warren County soil. Monuments, markers, the ruins of fortifications, and place names reminiscent of participants in that strug- gle, bear witness to its intensity.

To this borderland beside a highway of death and destruction not even the hardiest frontiersmen, equally skilled in the use of rifle, ax, and plow, dared bring their families, make clearings, and make crude homes until the struggle between the French and British for the possession of the western colonial empire ended. Even then the few who first came to Warren County had hardly established themselves when another struggle, the War for Independence from Great Britain, wiped out their new commu- nities, as Indians, soldiers of both sides, and outlaws, ravaged the frontier with pillage and murder.

Thus for six generations after the martyrdom of St. Jogues in 1646, Warren County was part of the "dark and bloody ground" along the Great Warpath from Albany to Montreal. The scourge of tomahawk and scalping knife, bayonet and hatchet, musket and artillery, fire and sword was laid upon it. Here were felt the thrill of the victor, the despair of fugi- tive and captive; here were death by cold and hunger. Raiding parties and armies of Indians, Colonial settlers, and European conscripts, volun- teers, mercenaries, and professional soldiers trod its Indian trails and military roads and used Lake George for a highway.

In 1749, one year after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, there was much concern in the English Colonies regarding the activities of the busy French, whose Fort St. Frederic at Crown Point constantly sent out fron- tier raiding parties. Colonel William Johnson of the Mohawk country, merchant, Indian trader, commander of militia, and sometime Indian agent for the Province of New York, reported to Governor George Clin- ton that the French were attempting to alienate the friendship of the Iroquois for the English, and later that they were stirring up strife among these Indians. Johnson told of Indian forays, instigated by the French, which had killed pioneers or driven them from their new homes on the New York and New England frontier. He pointed out that even Sche- nectady and Albany were now menaced, and that the French were pushing

42

WARREN COUNTY GUIDE

their trading posts and building forts at Niagara and on the Ohio which would threaten the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontier also.

Long before war was declared both England and France were well aware of each other's preparations for attack in America by land and sea. In February 1755 Governor Shirley of Massachusetts wrote to James de Lancey, Lieutenant Governor of New York, discussing plans to repel the French on the Ohio, and to attack Nova Scotia with a fleet. He expressed the hope that New York, New Jersey, and New England could unite their "strength to erect such a fort near Crown Point, as may command the French fort there, and curb the city of Montreal itself."

As leader of such an expedition Shirley nominated Colonel Johnson, "without the least partiality to the governments concerned," he explained, but because Johnson was well known for his influence over the Iroquois, at this time joined by the Tuscaroras, and henceforth known as the Six Nations.

In April 1755 Johnson and Shirley attended a meeting called at Alex- andria, Virginia, by Major General Edward Braddock, newly arrived commander in chief of his Majesty's forces in North America, to plan for operations against the French. Braddock himself was to march into the Ohio country; Shirley was to make the attack on Niagara; and John- son, whom Braddock appointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs, was to lead the expedition against Crown Point.

Johnson at once employed Peter Wraxall of Albany, who ably per- formed for him the functions of secretary, aide-de-camp, and "Boswell." Writing effusively from camp at Lake George, Wraxall was ever diligent that the best side of his master's leadership should be presented in his correspondence and reports to the Colonial governors and the English ministry at home. He played no small part in presenting the expedition, which failed to reach its goal, as a glorious victory for Johnson.

On April 16, Johnson received from Shirley his formal commission as major general in command of the expedition. His plan was to hold a grand powwow with the Iroquois and their allies at his home, next to assemble the troops, artillery, and stores at Albany, and then march north, cutting and clearing his own road as the army advanced, and building "such strong houses and places of security" as might be necessary to shelter the men, ammunition, and supplies.

Upon arrival at Crown Point he was to erect a fort on a nearby hill commanding the French fort, and call on the commandant to retire "from the same, as being an encroachment upon His Majesty's territories, within the Country belonging to the Indians of the Six Nations, and erected contrary to the Treaty of Utrecht . . . whereby the Indians of the

WARREN COUNTY GUIDE 43

then Five Nations are expressly declared to be subject to the Crown of Great Britain." Nothing in Johnson's orders compelled him to attack Crown Point unless he first met with resistance — a nice point in that the mother countries were officially at peace.

There were bickerings and delays and the beginning of a bitter feud between Johnson and Shirley, who took for his own expedition troops meant for Crown Point, and belittled Johnson in his dealings with the Indians. In camp the Yorkers and Connecticut and New Hampshire troops quarreled with each other, and there were endless jealousies and disputes among the officers of Johnson's staff.

Johnson had plenty to occupy him before his recruits began to trickle into Albany late in June. He asked for an allowance for the proper main- tenance of his "new dignity and station," extra pay for officers in the Indian service, more gifts and presents for the Indians, and laws to curb the practice of buying the weapons and clothing of the Indians with rum.

The New York Assembly drew up "some Hints for a Commanding Officer" which contained sound advice about the necessity for adequate supplies, an admonition to "engage in no action of importance without the advice of a Council of War" and the sage observation that since "prayers have often a good effect, especially among New England men, a well gifted New England parson might therefore be a useful imple- ment." They also bade him carry a few conch shells to call in stragglers and suggested that he provide his sentries with watch dogs.

By the time the village of tents had begun to spread over the pastures across the river from Albany, Johnson wished he had never undertaken the job because of all the dispute, confusion, and delay which to his Tory mind were "consequences but too natural in so divided a system." The discipline and training of raw levies from farm and shop, enlisted "for the duration," chafing under the inactivity and restrictions of camp life, was no easy task. Soldiering was not the business of the Colonial recruit, who desired and, indeed, demanded a quick campaign soon finished so that he could go home to farm and fireside.

Carrying out Johnson's orders to select campsites and keep the men busy was Captain William Eyre, detached from Braddock's command to be artillery officer and engineer of the Crown Point expedition. A little later, encamped in Warren County at the head of Lake George, which turned out to be their journey's end, Eyre, with Wraxall and Glazier, made up that small official family which regularly sided with Johnson in his difficulties with the New England officers.

On July 17, 1755, Johnson issued orders to Major General Phineas Lyman of Connecticut, his second in command, to march with 1,100

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men of his own regiment and the Massachusetts regiments of Colonel Timothy Ruggles and Colonel Ephraim Williams to the Great Carrying Place, at first called Fort Lydius, then Fort Lyman, and finally Fort Edward. Lyman was to take with him two brass field pieces, ammunition, stores, and bateaux, clear the road along the Hudson by way of Old Sara- toga of trees, logs, and stumps, widen it to 25 or 30 feet, repair it, and build bridges, be on guard for lurking parties of French Indians, and take care not to fire on friendly Indians acting as scouts. Arrived at the Carry- ing Place, his division was to encamp and erect log buildings to store powder, supplies, and provisions.

On that same day Johnson's smoldering dispute with General Shirley broke into a full-blown feud because of Shirley's efforts to enlist Indians for the Niagara expedition without consulting Johnson. On the advice of Goldsbrow Banyar, his friend among the great, Johnson's Wraxall exercised care to write long accounts of the actions of Shirley and their effect on the good of the service. These he sent to the Colonial Governors, the Lords of Trade in London, and to Thomas Pownall, who became Gov- ernor of Massachusetts in 1757, and was now about to return to England, where he would, it was hoped, place Johnson's grievances and services in the right light with the home government.

Johnson complained bitterly about Shirley's chief Indian agent, Colonel John Henry Lydius, a rival of his in Indian affairs, who, until 1745, had conducted an important trading post at the Great Carrying Place. John- son professed to distrust him because of his trade with French Indians, his marriage to a Canadian half-breed wife, and a suspicion of illegal traffic with the French. This petty jealousy and selfish rancor was delaying the expeditions and making it increasingly evident that since both Shirley and Johnson wanted to be the great man of the war, the close of the campaign must find one or both in disfavor with the Crown.

In this time of confusion wild rumors flew through the camp beside the Hudson of Braddock's defeat and death near Fort Duquesne, and on July 26 Shirley automatically succeeded to the supreme command. The same day Shirley ordered Johnson, in case he met a superior force of the French on his march to Crown Point, to retreat to Albany and protect the Province of New York from attack. So disturbed was Johnson that he told both Shirley and de Lancey that he must have Indians to win at Crown Point. He further informed de Lancey that because of Braddock's defeat, Shirley's interference in Indian affairs, and the danger of a general attack in force by the enemy, it might be advisable to build a fort at the Carrying Place, garrison it with Lyman's division, arrived or about to arrive there, and hold the balance of his army in their present camp to cover the city of Albany and to act as a reinforcement for Lyman.

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Having received no new orders by August 1, Johnson sent the second division of his army, 1,105 men with ten pieces of field artillery under his third ranking officer, Colonel Moses Titcomb of Massachusetts, to the Great Carrying Place to join the forces of Major General Lyman. On August 3 , Johnson received word from de Lancey to proceed according to plan and that he would try to obtain reinforcements from his own Assem- bly and from Connecticut.

It was not till leaky bateaux had been repaired that Johnson was able to march on August 9 with the third division of his army, about 800 strong. It took five days to drag the artillery and wagons by horse team and oxen through the hot, green wilderness to the Great Carrying Place. There he issued orders for Colonel Blanchard with his New Hampshire troops, who had finally given up the dangerous idea of marching direct to Crown Point and had arrived at Albany, to impress wagons, the river being too low for loaded bateaux, and march overland to join the expedi- tion. At the same time a council of war asked reinforcements of 1,000 men from Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Only 40 Indians had joined the army, and at Albany there were difficul- ties about provisions and a shortage of wagons, while camp discipline and inaction fomented disorder and insubordination among officers as well as men. Lieutenant Esa Noble, of Colonel Seth Pomeroy's company in Colonel Ephraim Williams' regiment, found guilty of "supporting and exciting a mutinous disposition in certain soldiers," was sentenced to make "public and audible acknowledgment of his crime with promises of future good behavior at the head of each regiment." Men were confined for fighting, for swearing, for firing their rifles contrary to orders, for sleep- ing on sentry duty. The birch rod, the irons, and the wooden horse were frequently in use.

At a council of war, on August 18, it was decided to send out 1,500 men under Lyman to cut a road to South Bay, if that was found to be the best and most practical route. It was also voted to build the proposed fort and to send all women in the camp back to Albany by the first wagon train. On the 22nd Johnson dispatched a list of wagoners, who, with their horses and wagons, had deserted from camp at the Carrying Place, to Sybrant G. Van Schaik, Albany magistrate, with a demand that the offenders be prosecuted. The deserters, mostly impressed Dutch farmers, apparently had small love for the English cause and the Dutch magistrates were little concerned to punish them.

On August 24 Johnson wrote the various Colonial governors that the Caughnawagas were to take the field for the French. This, he said, would make the Iroquois less willing than ever to ally themselves to the English because they had mothers, sisters, and brothers among the French Indians,

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and made even more urgent the need for strong and speedy reinforce- ments. Also he conveyed the information that a road "is now making from this place to Lake St. Sacrament [Lake George] where I propose to build magazines and raise a defensible fortification."

This carried the expedition into what is now Warren County, and the military road then built by Johnson is today followed very closely by US Route 9 between Glens Falls and the village of Lake George. For a gen- eration it was the scene of the bloodiest of battles, skirmishes, and raids on supply trains and travelers. Sizable trees had time to grow in the clearings made for the encampment and forts at Lake George and for the stockaded outposts along the way, before permanent settlements were made, because the first settlers who tried to take advantage of these clear- ings were driven out by the campaigns of the American Revolution.

Three days before Johnson's announcement of his plan to take the Warren County route and build a fort at Lake St. Sacrament, Mohawk scouts had arrived from Canada with news that the French were shipping troops to Crown Point, that they proposed to attack the English at South Bay if they advanced by Wood Creek, or at the pass called Ticonderoga if they came through Lake St. Sacrament. Councils of war held during the next two days had decided upon a change to the lake route.

After a wrangle among his officers over the fortifications at Fort Ly- man, Johnson, at the head of a detachment of 1,500 men, a few Indians, and some field pieces, set forth on August 26 over the crude way opened to the Lake through dense forest without a single clearing. Toward evening two days later they arrived at beautiful Lake St. Sacrament and began the task of hewing down forest giants to make a camp. Before leaving the Carrying Place, Johnson, overriding objectors, had ordered Lyman to keep 300 men at work there building the fort, to set twenty- five men under a guard of the same number at the task of repairing the lake road, and then to send up the heavy artillery and baggage. The stores and the rest of the troops, however, were to remain at the Carrying Place until the stockaded encampment could be completed.

Indians to the number of about 200 led by the venerable Mohawk chief, King Hendrick, Johnson's close personal friend, reached the camp at Lake George on the 29th or 30th. The new arrivals brought the Indian contingent in camp to a mere 300, a disappointing number in view of the promises made at Johnson's Indian conference in June. Shirley's inter- ference, Braddock's defeat, and the Caughnawagas' declaration for the French, had seriously affected the Indians, always temperamental and easily swayed.

On September 1, 175 5, the name Lake George made its first appearance on paper. Johnson's report to General Shirley on that day was headed

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"Camp at Lake George," and in the letter the General announced that "this lake which the French call Lake St. Sacrament, we have called Lake George."

Johnson complained bitterly of deserting wagoners and remarked that lack of transportation might retard his taking "post at Ticonderogue." Word from Lieutenant Governor Spencer Phips that 800 men were being raised by Massachusetts of whom some were already on their way to Albany, and from Governor Thomas Fitch that Connecticut was enlist- ing 2,000 men who would soon be ready to march, further complicated the problem of bringing up supplies.

An old feud between the governor and assembly of Pennsylvania pre- cluded aid from that quarter and caused Benjamin Franklin to write, "Thus, from petty, private considerations in particular Colonies, general public good is obstructed and prevented; which shows more and more the necessity of our proposed union." The New York assembly could not make up its mind promptly to vote another 400 men, and New Hampshire flatly refused further reinforcements. More than ever the harassed John- son fervently wished he were independent of governors and assemblies.

Nevertheless he pushed to completion his camp at Lake George. It occu- pied the summit of a slight rise and fronted on the road to the Carrying Place. In the rear lay the wide expanse of the Lake. On the right, at the foot of a steep declivity, lay a swamp with a hill beyond it. On that hill Johnson set 400 men to work clearing a site for a fortress. A few days after the first of September the camp expanded as Lyman marched in from the Carrying Place with the second division of the army. He left behind only the five companies of Yorkers under Colonel William Cock- croft and the Hampshires of Blanchard who were fighting among them- selves and neglecting work on the fort.

At Johnson's camp on Lake George also the Yorkers were mutinous. They demanded the pay due them and the General ordered it up, at the same time expressing himself impatiently on the subject of money and its uses in an "unhabited woods." It was not easy to keep sentries alert, and the inadequate wagon train became an even more serious problem when he ordered 200 bateaux brought up from the Carrying Place and expressed a determination to advance on Ticonderoga if the small enemy force re- ported there by his scouts was not augmented.

On September 7, Indian patrols dispatched toward Crown Point suddenly returned to camp with startling news which King Hendrick conveyed to a council of war. The French were marching in force from the direction of South Bay toward the English post at the Carrying Place. Johnson hurriedly sent two expresses to warn Blanchard. Guards were doubled and the men ordered to lie on their arms all night.

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About the time Braddock and his regiments left England, there had sailed from France a force of 3,000 French regulars under Baron Dieskau, an experienced veteran of the European campaigns of the great Marshal Saxe. When the papers of the dead Braddock, revealing plans of the expe- ditions of Johnson and Shirley, arrived in Quebec, Dieskau with his army was there. Promptly the Marquis de Vaudreuil, Governor of Canada, ordered the Baron to march southward and protect the Champlain Valley.

In August, Dieskau, with about 700 regulars, 1,600 Canadians and 700 Indians, arrived at Crown Point. Toward the latter part of the month he set off with most of this force in a long line of canoes that traveled swiftly down Lake Champlain to Ticonderoga. Here he camped and pressed his intractable Indians and their leader, Legardeur de Saint Pierre, to obtain information as to the whereabouts of Johnson.

On September 4 he was told that the main army of English were at Lake George and only 500 Colonials guarded the fort at the Great Carry- ing Place. Advised by his officers that the American farmers would not fight, Dieskau boldly divided his force to march southward with a more mobile unit of 216 regulars, 684 Canadians, and 600 Indians. Embarking their canoes on the ever narrowing southern arm of Lake Champlain, this detachment paddled to Two Rocks in the Great Marsh or Drowned Lands, where the lake was little wider than a brook.

On the 5th they advanced to the head of South Bay and encamped for the night. At dawn, Dieskau ordered each man to pack several days supply of food. Leaving their canoes and baggage, the force then set off through the dense wilderness to halt at noon "beyond the mountains," probably near old Fort Anne. Here, on the 7th, the Baron issued instruc- tions for a rapid advance and attack on Fort Lyman at nightfall. For guides and scouts he ordered into the van St. Pierre and his Indians, Hurons, Adirondacks, Abenakis, and Caughnawaga Iroquois, all painted for battle.

Schooled in European warfare, Dieskau possessed little knowledge of Indian ways. He did not know that his red allies had no intention of leading an advance on the fort. Facing cannon was never their idea of a good fight. Toward evening, the column broke out of the woods on John- son's military road near the Hudson, not at Fort Lyman, but at the foot of Sandy Hill. Dieskau raged at the Indians, and berated a country that required the use of such intolerable allies. But the only result was a point blank refusal to attack Fort Lyman. Resignedly Dieskau ordered an encampment.

Then fate began to write history. Scouting French Indians shot and scalped at least one of Johnson's express riders galloping to warn Blanch-

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ard and carried his papers to their commander. A little later they inter- cepted a group of ten or twelve English wagoners who had chosen a bad moment to desert. Two were captured, the others raced back toward Lake George. About midnight they burst into camp and reported their encounter with the French. They had heard firing, they said, and a man "call on heaven for mercy." Johnson realized that the man must have been poor Adams, his messenger to Blanchard.

In the grey dawn Johnson's war council wanted to order out two de- tachments of 500 men each, one to South Bay to intercept the enemy if they retreated, the other to advance down the Military Road and relieve the unfinished fort at the Carrying Place. Wise old King Hendrick, insisting that this was folly, picked up a stick, broke it, and then showed that a bundle of sticks was stronger.

Heeding this good advice only in part, Johnson ordered the commands united under Colonel Ephraim Williams of Massachusetts and asked Hen- drick to accompany the Provincials with 200 of his Mohawks. Still protesting that "if they are to fight they are too few, if they are to die they are too many," the aged chief, too fat to go on foot, bowed to the wishes of his friend, who lent him a white horse. After he had harangued his followers before leading them to battle, the column marched from camp while it was still early morning.

Similar and almost simultaneous events were taking place in the French encampment beside the Hudson. Possessed of almost complete information on the strength of his foe by virtue of the captured wagoners, Dieskau in council, on the morning of September 8, demanded of his Indians that they join him in an attack on Johnson. "The more English there are, the more we shall kill," he boasted. The intrepid Baron well knew that the enemy outnumbered him but was allowing his contempt for the Colonial farmer-soldiers to sway his mind, adding another error to the one made when, in direct disobedience to Vaudreuil's orders, he had left most of his regulars behind on the plateau of Ticonderoga.

The Indians now agreed to accompany him. There would be scalps and plunder; and a camp, so they thought, would not have cannon. Eagerly Dieskau prepared to march. The regulars, in the center, would advance along the road; the Canadians and Indians were ordered to the flanks. It probably concerned the Baron little that this forced his troublesome allies to beat their way in broken ranks through the tangled brush and woods that lined the highway.

About ten o'clock in the morning the French approached a dark,wooded defile between the rugged ramparts of French Mountain on the right and the gradual slopes of West Mountain on the left. The column suddenly

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halted as advance scouts brought in a prisoner. An English detachment was marching south along the road. Dieskau issued quick commands. The Canadians and Indians, at their best in brush fighting, swiftly dis- appeared behind the rocks, trees, and thickets of the slopes on either side of the defile. The regulars were stationed at the rear to command the road. Then, as all movement ceased, silence settled over the ambush.

Colonel Williams, an Indian fighter of some experience, approached the trap, his troops in solid marching order, two abreast. Apparently unaware that the French were near he had ordered out neither scouts nor flankers. Only the presence of Hendrick and his Mohawks in the van saved the col- umn from utter annihilation. Dieskau's Iroquois could not resist warning their brother Mohawks. Before the English were well within the jaws of the semi-circle of death a few Caughnawagas fired a warning volley.

A withering burst followed from the regulars and Canadians. A shot brought down the weighty King Hendrick's conspicuous white horse, and a French bayonet put an end to the chief as he struggled to rise, while his Mohawks took to the woods. Williams bravely led a charge up the hill to the right, whence poured a heavy fire. Rashly he leaped upon a large rock to urge his men on and fell dead as a rifle ball pierced his brain.

British Colonials dropped on all sides, shot by an enemy they could not see. Panic seized them, the van dropped back, the rear pushed forward, rank folded upon rank, they broke, and the retreat became almost a rout.

Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Whiting, second in command, stormed and exhorted till finally the more courageous rallied. These began to use the tactics they knew best. Retreating from tree to tree and bush to bush, they poured a galling fire on the French. Men fell on all sides. Indians leaped in to tomahawk the wounded and scalp the dead.

Captain Solomon Keys, shot and dying, was placed beside a tree with a loaded rifle to kill himself as the Indians approached. Keeping him company in death were Major Noah Ashley, Captains Hawley, Porter, Ingersoll, Stoddard, Stevens, and Farrell, brother-in-law of Johnson, Lieutenants Cobb, Burt, Pomeroy, and others. More than 200 Colonials were killed or wounded. Neither did the French escape unscathed. Among their officer dead was Legardeur St. Pierre, who had commanded at Fort le Boeuf in the Ohio country at the time Washington traveled there on a mission for Governor Robert Dinwiddie.

As the ominous sound of slaughter came nearer and nearer to his camp, Johnson hurriedly ordered a sortie by Colonel Edw.ard Cole and 300 men to relieve the pressure on the beleaguered Provincials. Covered by Cole's well-directed fire, the beaten detachment streamed into camp at about

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eleven o'clock, and the so-called Bloody Morning Scout, prelude to the main battle, was over.

Actually Colonel Williams led no mere scouting party. It was a fight- ing detachment of 1,000 soldiers and 200 Indians sent to the relief of Blanchard at Fort Lyman, which Dieskau had intended to attack first. Though the fight lasted but one brief hour, it cost Johnson and his Indians their heaviest casualties.

A half hour later the emboldened Dieskau, as if on parade, marched his column directly up the road against the English encampment. The regu- lars, bayonets gleaming in the sun, held the center. The Canadians filtered into the woods right and left, the Indians in support. Halting just within gunshot range and firing by platoons in their best European manner, the veterans opened the attack. The Canadians and Indians advanced behind the cover of trees, which extended to the barricade of logs, wagons, and bateaux thrown up around the camp.

Johnson's Provincials, their first panic over as Dieskau failed to press an immediate attack, returned the French fire volley for volley. Though untrained in military tactics, they were dead shots with their long hunting rifles. Captain Eyre now joined the din, throwing grapeshot from the three large cannon at the front of the camp on the regulars exposed in the road. At the same time he ordered the six field pieces posted on the hill to the left to open up on the Canadian militia and redskins among the trees. The reserve corps, aided by two brass field pieces, blazed away whenever an attempt was made to rush the camp from the right, where swamp and lake made attack less easy.

Through the long afternoon the battle raged, its fury abated for brief intervals only. Johnson received a painful flesh wound in the leg early in the engagement. Retiring to his tent, he turned over the command to General Lyman, who carried on with courage and energy. Though he also took chances with his life at the barricade, he escaped injury.

Dieskau knew well enough that his best opportunity had been at the moment of the first assault, while the untrained defenders were waver- ing. He had indeed thrown in his disciplined regulars, but they were not enough, and he could not control his Canadians and Indians at the critical juncture. Recklessly exposing himself close to the British line in order to urge the Canadians and Indians to a flank attack, he was wounded in the leg.

While his adjutant, Montreuil, also injured, was cleansing Dieskau's wound with brandy, the general was hit again in the knee and thigh. Leaving the thrice-wounded commander seated behind a tree, Montreuil

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brought two Canadians to carry him to safety. One of them was shot down, and Dieskau, refusing to let his adjutant leave the battle to help him, ordered Montreuil to lead the regulars in another attack.

The grenadiers of La Reine and Languedoc fought stubbornly, their ranks decimated by grape and rifle shot. They received little support, however, for the Canadians and Indians had no stomach for steady cannon fire. Dieskau's mistake in leaving two-thirds of his regulars behind, his rash overconfidence, and his underestimate of the fighting ability of the American soldiers, were bringing their tragic consequences.

It was after four o'clock when the French regulars, abandoning the frontal assault, led a last ditch charge on the right. They were nearly shot to pieces by the steady fire of the regiments of Colonels Titcomb, the late Williams, and Timothy Ruggles. Bolder spirits among the Colonials even jumped the barricade and fought the enemy from behind trees. Leading his men in this type of fighting, rifle in hand, Colonel Moses Titcomb, next in rank to Lyman, was killed. As the French fire wavered and slackened, Lyman ordered a charge. With a yell the English Colon- ists leaped the breastworks and drove the enemy before them with clubbed rifle and hatchet.

Dieskau, helpless with his wounds, saw a musket aimed at him. Though he made a sign not to shoot, a bullet plowed through his hips and the soldier who had fired it, leaping upon him, ordered him in French to sur- render. Dieskau's own account as quoted by Parkman from a document in the French Archives de la Guerre follows:

I said, "You rascal, why did you fire? You see a man lying in his blood on the ground and you shoot him!"

He answered, "How did I know you had not got a pistol? I had rather kill the devil than have the devil kill me." "You are a Frenchman?" I asked.

"Yes," he replies; "it is more than ten years since I left Canada;" whereupon several others fell on me and stripped me.

I told them to carry me to their general, which they did. On learning who I was, he sent for surgeons, and, though wounded himself, refused all assistance till my wounds were dressed. Johnson had no easy task in protecting his wounded foe from the fury of his Mohawk allies, enraged because of their losses in the morning am- bush, and especially at the death of their beloved chief, King Hendrick. Bursting into the tent where both the rival commanders lay wounded, they disputed angrily with Johnson in their own language.

To Dieskau's query, the British general replied, "What do they want? To burn you, by God, eat you, and smoke you in their pipes in revenge

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for three or four of their chiefs that were killed. But never fear; you shall be safe with me, or else they shall kill us both."

Again they returned, and though they finally calmed down, and, seem- ingly appeased, smiled and shook hands with Dieskau in token of friend- ship, Johnson warned him that there was still serious danger. Not wishing to embarrass his gallant host, the Frenchman asked to be moved to another tent, where Johnson posted a captain with fifty men to guard him. Even so, an Indian with a concealed sword slipped past the sentinel next morn- ing and was prevented from stabbing Dieskau only by quick action on the part of the colonel to whom the tent belonged. This officer wrested the sword from the intruder and pushed him out.

It is small wonder that when Montcalm, two years later, won a hard- fought victory at this spot, he was unable to restrain his more numerous Indian allies or to give his prisoners the protection promised them in the terms of surrender. It was perhaps the severest test of Johnson's strength of character and his influence over the Mohawks, as well as the highest tribute to his honor as a gentleman and a soldier, that he succeeded in protecting his fallen foe. When Dieskau's wounds were sufficiently healed Johnson sent him with an armed escort via Fort Lyman and Albany to New York. Though he sailed for England in the spring, the Baron never fully recovered from his wounds.

After the final assault by the French had been repulsed and the defend- ers of the British camp had begun to relieve the wounded and count their dead, the rattle of musketry to the south was heard as the third episode of the Battle of Lake George was staged. In the morning an Indian runner had arrived at Fort Edward with news that a wagon train dispatched to Lake George had been ambushed and captured. Blanchard sent out scouts to reconnoiter. These soon returned to report the rattle of musketry toward the lake. Blanchard increased the force to 260 men under Captain Robert McGinnis and ordered it to the aid of Johnson.

Toward evening they arrived on the battleground of the Bloody Morn- ing Scout. Coming upon the French baggage the detail moved forward cautiously and surprised 300 Canadians and Indians who had deserted the battle to rob and scalp the dead. Their ghoulish work completed, they were resting beside a "piece of standing water near the road."

The first fire of the colonists did terrible execution, but the survivors resisted fiercely. Mortally wounded, Captain McGinnis continued to direct his men till they had won, when he fainted. His second in com- mand, Folsom, was also wounded. Baron Longueil, leader of the Canadians and Indians, received a fatal injury, and few of the men in his command escaped. The bodies were cast into the pool and their blood dyed the waters red; this pool is still called Bloody Pond.

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Moving on, McGinnis' detachment reached the camp in time to assist in the final rout of the French. Under cover of darkness Chevalier de Montreuil, second in command to Dieskau, rallied his shattered forces behind French Mountain on the shore of Glen Lake, camped for the night, and retreated across country to his canoes at South Bay. The French losses probably totaled 400, though they reported only 228, while Johnson re- ported a loss of 262 killed, wounded, and missing.

The successful defenders did not pursue. Wraxall was busy penning Johnson's reports of success to the Colonial governors and to the English ministry, while the commander in chief himself was nursing his wound and protecting the French general from the wrath of the Indians. Park- man says that Major General Lyman later urged Johnson to advance on Ticonderoga, but the record of a council of war held the day after the bat- tle shows Lyman joining the other field officers in a unanimous vote to em- ploy "all our time in securing ourselves here in the best manner possible."

Shirley and the Colonial governors urged an advance, but Johnson argued that his men were too exhausted and battered, that he had only 1,800 or 1,900 effectives, that the strength of the French was unknown, and that he had an insufficient number of wagons to bring up provisions and bateaux. Aside from all this, he suffered considerably from his wound and was able to maintain only a surface harmony with his leading field officers, including Lyman. He was also deserted by his red allies who, having suffered a loss of 60 killed and wounded, went home to mourn.

Thus the opportunity to cut off the French retreat by destroying their canoes at South Bay was lost, and not till a week later was Johnson able to send a scouting party to Ticonderoga to learn the strength of the French forces. Then he wrote, "I think we may expect shortly a more formidable attack." As reinforcements arrived he set them to work rais- ing a solid breastwork to defend the camp and building a fort on the rising ground beside the Lake. Within two weeks after the battle the French behind their entrenchments at Ticonderoga were able to defy him,

So the army settled down in camp, drank copious quantities of rum, and daily grew more discontented. Johnson urged that a strong fort be built on the hill across the swamp but his council of war voted for a picketed stockade only, saying that the troops would do no digging. The general took the matter to the governors and in a letter to Captain Robert Orme, Braddock's aide-de-camp, asserted he would have his fort in spite of "the obstinacy and ignorance of these officers by whose advice I am obliged to regulate my proceedings."

On September 1 5 Johnson, fearing a new attack, demanded that the mayor and the magistrates of Albany impress every horse and wagon in the county to bring up provisions and stores, arrest any persons hiding

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their conveyances, and punish those wagoners who had already deserted his army. Thirty French prisoners, including Baron Dieskau and his aide- de-camp, were sent to Albany on the 16th. On the 21st Johnson ordered Cockcroft to be about the business of finishing the fort on the Hudson despite quarrels between Connecticut troops and Yorkers. He proclaimed that its name would be Fort Edward, "in honor of the second Prince of the Blood." Toward the end of September a shortage of rum, meat, and bread caused Johnson to order that no further reinforcements be sent up from Albany.

In camp at Lake George, discontent and sickness increased. A rumor spread that the army could advance but that the wounded Johnson would not turn over the command to Lyman. There was another story that the general was forced to place his friend Eyre in irons because the artillery officer had fired over the heads of the French during the battle. Finally Johnson had his field officers in council on September 29 acknowledge the falsity of these back-fence tales. The same council, after hearing a request from Sir Charles Hardy, the new governor of New York, for a strong fort at Lake George, voted to detach 700 men from all other duty to build one.

September drifted into October and the army unwillingly settled deeper into camp. Wraxall went to Albany to report direct to Hardy on insub- ordination, differences of opinion between Johnson and field officers, and shortage of wagons. At the same time Johnson added a new member to his official family — Captain Beamsley Glazier.

Governor Hardy urged that Johnson push on and Goldsbrow Banyar warned the general that he should at least give the appearance of action to save the prestige already gained. Lieutenant Governor Phips wrote that the Massachusetts people would be greatly disappointed if the army failed to advance after large sums had been appropriated for reinforcements.

Ill with his wound, Johnson, on October 9, finally gave Lyman author- ity to call a council of war. That afternoon the council decided that the troops could not march. The forces in camp were not sufficient, a large enough stock of food was lacking, and provision wagons could not be spared to bring up boats from Fort Edward and ammunition from The Flats and from Half Moon.

On Sunday, October 12, a council of war, again presided over by Ly- man, reported that there were 3,600 men at Lake George, 500 at Fort Edward, and 2,500 recruits at Albany or on the march to camp. Of this number 700 were unfit for duty because of a shortage of tents, bedding, and heavy clothing. The council further held that there had been at no time more than a two-week supply of food, except meat, in camp, and

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that it was now becoming increasingly difficult to bring up provisions because of impassable roads, breaking down of wagons, and wearing out of horses. For these reasons they voted to notify the home governments that it was impracticable to proceed with the expedition.

Banyar, sympathizing with Johnson in these difficulties, commented sarcastically that "these are the blessed effects of that unbounded liberty we boast of and value ourselves for." As usual, and not wholly without reason, the Royalists, Tories, and army leaders blamed the delays of the democratic process and the dissensions among independent government agencies, unable to unite promptly in a common undertaking, as the reason for military ineffectiveness.

A third council of war on Sunday and Monday, October 19 and 20, presided over by Lyman, again voted that an advance was impossible. It was pointed out that the food was decreasing, the rivers rising, the roads growing worse, one-third of the men were sick because of the long en- campment, and 3,000 French were entrenched at Ticonderoga. In his report to the various governors, Johnson added another reason: the troops were homesick, tired of army life, ill-prepared for cold weather, and dis- inclined to proceed farther.

On October 29 Massachusetts appointed a commission to inquire into the conduct of Johnson's army. The following day the general proposed to a council of war that they attack the French outpost at Ticonderoga. The proposal was voted down. On the 31st, Connecticut requested that its troops be disbanded and sent home.

Meanwhile Governor Shirley had abandoned his expedition against Niagara and returned to Albany, where he had received a Crown commis- sion as commander in chief of His Majesty's Forces in North America. There, on November 7, Johnson sent him a report that the fort at Lake George, almost ready for garrison, had been named Fort William Henry, "after two of the Royal Family." Two days later he congratulated Shirley on his new office and asked to be relieved of his military command in order to devote himself to his duties as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, an office to which he had been appointed by Braddock. Shirley coldly re- fused to accept the resignation and it may here be noted that Johnson had received his military title from Shirley.

In the same dispatch the general advised Shirley that the Connecticut troops had learned of their government's desire to have them discharged, that they attempted to march from camp, complained that they had only a biscuit a day, half a pint of flour, and no sauce for their meat. They were restrained, he said, only by a promise that they would be discharged after 12 more days of work on the fort.

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As the cold rains of November fell on the ill-equipped camp, it settled into something near despair. The lack of sanitary regulations had long since made it a place of inexpressible filth. A fierce stench rose and spread above the conglomeration of huts and tents. Even with twentieth-century army sanitation, casualties from disease far exceed those from wounds in action, so it is not surprising that at Fort William Henry sickness increased till twelve or fifteen men were being buried every day.

The military road was abominable; work gangs were continually out to keep it in some repair. Recruits from Albany were posted by the ford at Old Saratoga to help the supply wagons across the rising Hudson. Wagon trains, hub-deep in mud, pushed through with such difficulty that at times only one day's supply of bread remained in camp. Men muttered against their officers, officers wrangled among themselves, leaders differed with Johnson, and Johnson bitingly condemned what he termed the " democratical fabric" of his army.

But the deadly stalemate continued. The only excitement in camp was a report by Indian scouts on November 1 1 that a force of French with "countless campfires" was advanced to the east side of Lake George. Those rising young military men, Captains Robert Rogers and Israel Putnam of the Rangers, went out on scout to prove the alarm groundless. Finally, on November 17, a council of officers from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York, which met at Albany with Governor Hardy and Major General Shirley, recommended what amounted to an absolute order that Johnson "advance against the enemy." On November 21 and 22 John- son's field officers again voted in council that the state of the army was such that it could not proceed. In private they told the general that the men would flatly refuse to march if so ordered.

A council on November 24 and 25, attended by the commissioners from the several governments, who had journeyed to Lake George, ordered the troops discharged and the expedition abandoned. By agreement a quota from the regiments of each Colony would make up the garrison of 430 men for Fort William Henry and 320 for Fort Edward. Colonel Jonathan Bagly was left behind as commandant at the lake and Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Whiting at the post on the Hudson. They had detailed instruc- tions from Captain Eyre on how best to defend the new fortresses — irregular squares with bastioned corners, palisaded walls, and earth-filled ramparts enclosing frame barracks.

At Albany on December 2 Johnson wrote his final report to the Colo- nial Governors. The record proved, he asserted, that it would have been imprudent for his forces to advance and he maintained that the disap- pointment manifest in some governments was being "nursed and strength-

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ened" by members of his own army "from political and selfish motives." "Without wishing to insinuate my own consequences," he pointed out that a failure to defeat Dieskau would "not only have destroyed all our other military operations, have totally lost us all our remaining Indian allies, but have plunged these northern Colonies into the most calamitous situation and opened streams of blood in every vein." For meritorious service he named only the members of his official family, Wraxall, Eyre, and Glazier. On behalf of Major General Lyman, who carried the burden of the Battle of Lake George, he penned not a word. In concluding Johnson resigned his command.

That Shirley instructed Johnson to continue as Superintendent of In- dian Affairs was no indication that the breach between the two men was healed. In fact, Johnson's friends about this time succeeded in calling to the King's attention the interference of Shirley in the Indian department, his failure in the Niagara expedition, and his culpability in ordering the removal by Colonel Dunbar of Braddock's defeated veterans from Vir- ginia to Albany, thus permitting the Indian allies of the French to ravage the undefended frontier of Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.

The events of the next few months proved that Johnson's campaign at the court of King George had been successful. In February word arrived that Johnson had been made a baronet; in April came news of a grant to him of 5,000 pounds by Parliament; in June he received a royal commis- sion as colonel of the Six Nations and sole superintendent of Indian affairs. At the same time Colonel Daniel Webb arrived with orders to supersede Shirley. It is small wonder that forever after Johnson was intensely hated by the embittered Shirley.

Plans were now pushed for the campaign of 1756. Webb was super- seded by Major General James Abercromby and His Lordship, the Earl of Loudoun, was placed in command over both. They constituted a trio of ineptitude in sharp contrast to Shirley, who, if headstrong and vain, was also energetic and zealous. Because of their timorousness and obstinacy in time of crisis, Webb and Abercromby showed themselves unequal to the difficult tasks imposed upon them. Because Loudoun trumpeted much, marched back and forth, frittered away his time with ineffectual activity, but never found time to make an attack, he earned general disapproval at Albany, Fort Edward, and Fort William Henry.

Before the arrival of his successors Shirley made plans to lead an expe- dition to reinforce Oswego and attack the French forts at Niagara, and to place Major General John Winslow of Boston at the head of another march against Crown Point. In June Abercromby removed Shirley from this command and in July Loudoun withdrew the Niagara expedition

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entirely. He ordered all efforts joined for the attack on Ticonderoga, where the French, laboring all winter after Johnson's failure to advance, had thrown up the fortress called Carillon. About this time, after a year of war, the mother countries gave formal recognition to the state of con- flict by formal declarations.

Slowly Loudoun's army gathered into camps at Albany, Fort Edward, and Fort William Henry. To protect his line of communications he built the blockhouse and stockaded enclosure at Halfway Brook, known as Seven Mile Post, located just north of the present city of Glens Falls on US 9. It soon became noted as a frontier stopping place and notorious as the site of bloody ambushes by the Canadian and Indian bushrangers. In June, July, and August these allies of France frequently raided the Eng- lish supply line, plundering wagon trains, slaughtering indiscriminately the guards, teamsters, and woman passengers. They practiced those fron- tier and border warfare tactics, used alike by Indians and white men on both sides, that made the military road across Warren County from the Hudson River to Lake George a "continuous scene of carnage."

By August, 10,000 Provincials had gathered for the storming of Ticon- deroga, with Colonel Lyman in command of the camp at Fort Edward and Colonel Bagly at Fort William Henry. Then the blow foreseen by Shirley fell. Montcalm in a rapid maneuver took Oswego, destroyed the British fort, and captured the garrison. Immediately he returned to Ticonderoga, bringing reinforcements released by the victory from the French posts on Lake Ontario. His army at Carillon swelled to upwards of 5,000 men.

The alarmed Loudoun ordered his army on the defensive. And so once more the grumbling Colonials settled down in the insanitary northern camps. There, with scant regard for cleanliness in the location of slaughter houses, graves, kitchens, and latrines the men died at the rate of a dozen or more each day. The only activity fell to Rogers, Putnam, Stark, and their Rangers, who scouted and harassed the enemy and did their best to protect the line of supply from the lightning thrusts of Canadians and Indians.

Montcalm did not advance; he was content to hold Carillon. Thus the armies remained, separated by the 32 miles of Lake George's primitive beauty, until winter ended all hope of action on a large scale.

Captain Robert Rogers and a hundred of his Rangers relieved the monotony of the winter camp in January. After making snowshoes for themselves, a party of 74 set off on January 17 to scout around Ticon- deroga. There they found more than they bargained for and in a disastrous snowshoe battle with the French and Indians they lost fourteen dead, six

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captured and six wounded, including Rogers, whose head was grazed by one bullet and his wrist broken by another. To be sure, the Rangers gave a good account of themselves in the fight, for the French admitted 37 casualties, but they brought home very little useful information. Rogers was laid up for the rest of the winter; while his wound was healing at Fort William Henry he contracted smallpox, which was decimating the garrison.

The campaign of 1757 was opened by the French attack on Fort William Henry in March. A detachment of 1,500 regulars, provincials, and Indians was sent to Fort Carillon under the command of Sieur de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, brother of the Governor of Canada. In mid-month, reinforced by another hundred men from the garrison, they advanced up the frozen surface of Lake George, which was free of snow, traveling light and carrying supplies and stores for twelve days on hundreds of hand sleds. On the night of March 18 they sought the cover afforded by the northern slopes of French Mountain, reached the head of the lake, and made their way through the darkness across the ice toward the fort's northern ramparts.

According to tradition, Rigaud hoped to catch the garrison still in their cups while they were celebrating St. Patrick's Day, but for that he was too late. At all events the 346 effective defenders, including John Stark and his scouts, were on the alert, and greeted the French with a burst of can- non fire. Having failed to surprise the garrison the French Provincials and Indians had no stomach for the kind of determined assault which, with their overwhelming superiority in numbers, should have been successful; and they did not use the hundreds of scaling ladders they had brought.

When le Mercier, chief of the Canadian artillery, whom they sent to parley with the British, returned with word that they would not consider surrender, but would hold the fort to the last man, the French merely besieged the fortress for five days, keeping well out of range and content- ing themselves with sallies to set fire to outbuildings and boats. On the 23rd they packed their remaining supplies, left a large number of sleds and five dead behind, and with derisive yells and futile volleys backtracked to Ticonderoga.

The English admitted the loss of only a few boats; the French claimed the destruction of "everything outside the fort, over 300 bateaux, 4 sloops, one of which was pierced for 16 guns, a sawmill, a great pile of building timber and firewood, two magazines full of provisions and mili- tary effects, and a little stockaded fort containing a dozen of houses or barracks to lodge the troops and their sick." Even at their own estimate the expedition was a poor bargain for the French. They had spent the

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King's money lavishly in equipping it with winter clothing and supplies and it was only the merchants and sutlers who profited.

After this attack on Fort William Henry, French scouts and scalping parties continued during the spring and summer to raid the English line of communications. At dawn, July 26, a force of French Indians suddenly darted from the Harbor Islands to surprise a detachment of 300 or 400 English, mostly recruits from New Jersey, commanded by Colonel John Parker, scouting down the lake from Fort William Henry. Only 1 2 sol- diers escaped; 131 were killed outright; of the rest who were taken captive some provided cannibal feasts for the red men there and at Montreal.

Despite these omens Loudoun continued to exhibit a genius for making the wrong move. In the early summer he concluded plans for an attack on Louisburg, the well-nigh impregnable French fortress in Nova Scotia. The outposts of the northern frontier, Fort Edward and Fort William Henry, were now exposed. It was an opportunity long awaited by the restless Montcalm. Once more, on the plateau of Ticonderoga, there gathered the regulars of La Reine, Languedoc, and other famous French regiments, this time to the number of about 3,000, together with Cana- dian militia and rangers totaling 2,500, and nearly 2,000 Indians.

On July 18, Montcalm arrived and within a fortnight all was in readi- ness. Although he detested the role he felt compelled to play, the gallant Marquis called the Indians together for a powwow to arouse them to the pitch of battle, joined in their deliberations, took part in their war dance, and made them his allies. Thus he considered it necessary to rear a monster that he knew was likely to get out of control and to bring bitter regret and remorse because of barbaric acts, for which he would be held responsible.

On July 30, Montcalm sent part of his troops under Levis along the west shore of Lake George, since there were not boats enough for the entire force. On August 1 , the rest of the 7,5 00 men embarked in a great flotilla of birch bark canoes, bateaux and other craft propelled by paddle, oar, and sail. That night they saw three fires forming a triangle high up on a mountain top which signaled to Montcalm that Levis had arrived at the appointed rendezvous, half way down the lake. Two days later the whole force appeared before Fort William Henry.

Montcalm then called on the fort to surrender to avoid the horrors of capture by assault, when it might be impossible to restrain the Indians. Although he had but 2,200 men, 500 in the fort and 1,700 in the fortified camp constructed by Johnson two years before, the stout-hearted Scotch commandant, Colonel George Monro of the British 35th, scorned the demand. French guns then landed in Artillery Cove, 800 men went to work under cover of night digging trenches and parallels, and the next

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day thirty-three pieces of artillery began to blow the sand and log ram- parts to bits. Meanwhile the brilliant Levis took post with 3,000 men in the rear of the fort to help fight off any attempted sally and to support the noted partisan Sieur de Luc de la Corne, who, with a detachment of Cana- dians and Indians, had encamped directly across the Fort Edward road.

The distant booming of cannon told Major General Webb at Fort Edward, that Fort William Henry, only fourteen miles away, was still holding out. Loudoun had taken 4,000 of the best American troops in addition to his British Regulars on the futile expedition against Louisburg, leaving Webb in command with not much over 4,500 men in all. Webb had sent a thousand men to reinforce Monro, increasing the garrison to 2,200 just before the French arrived.

But he did not do as he apparently intended when at the end of July he asked the Governor of New York for reinforcements because the French were advancing. What he then wrote was: "I am determined to march to Fort William Henry with the whole army under my command as soon as I hear of the further approach of the enemy." Perhaps he really meant only to frighten the Governor into hastening the reinforcements for Fort Edward and the posts between it and Albany. Though they arrived with more speed than usual, Webb failed to use them.

Sir William Johnson had received word from Webb on August 1 of his urgent need for aid because of Montcalm's approach. He was in the midst of an important council with Cherokees and other Indians, and though it was harvest time and every man was needed on the farms, he quickly gathered his militia. Still suffering from the wound he had received two years since, he arrived at Fort Edward after a day and a half in the saddle. Since Webb showed no sign of doing anything, Johnson sought and gained permission to lead out Putnam's rangers and a mixed force of volunteers who were clamoring for action.

Hardly had they gotten out of sight of Fort Edward when Webb re- called them and instead dispatched a courier with a message for Monro. La Corners Indians, who held the road outside Fort William Henry, killed the messenger, but the letter did eventually reach its destination. First it was brought to Montcalm who read that General Webb " does not think it prudent to attempt a junction or to assist you till reinforced by the militia of the colonies for the immediate march of which repeated ex- presses have been sent." It stated further that the French, in complete possession of the road between the forts, had very great strength in men and cannon, and advised Monro to come to terms with the enemy unless the militia arrived very soon.

A few days later, when the French cannon had half -destroyed the Brit- ish ramparts, Montcalm sent an officer with a flag of truce to deliver the

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letter to Monro. He was led blindfolded through the fort and returned under escort to the French lines. In his diary the French emissary, Bou- gainville, wrote, "He [Monro] returned many thanks for the courtesy of our nation, and protested his joy at having to do with so generous an enemy; this was his answer to Marquis de Montcalm ... I hope Webb's letter may induce the English to surrender the sooner."

Once more the cannon blazed and thundered, the sappers worked their way to the swamp by the lake, a causeway of logs and brush was built, guns were hauled across, and the cannonade was renewed from the camp garden only 200 yards from the English defences. Indians concealed among the maize, beans, and cabbages watched in glee. Sorties from camp and fort had been repulsed, more than 3 00 of the defenders had been killed and wounded, and smallpox raged among the survivors. The large cannon had all burst and only seven small pieces were in action, when, on August 9 at a morning council of officers, it was decided to raise the white flag and ask for terms.

Lieutenant Colonel Young went to Montcalm's tent, where it was agreed that the English troops should march out with the honors of war, retaining one field piece as a token of their brave defense. All the remain- ing arms and stores were to go to the French, who would escort the surrendered garrison to Fort Edward. The men were to be under parole not to serve against France for eighteen months, and all French prisoners captured in America since the war began were to be released. Montcalm called in the Indian chiefs, who agreed to restrain their young braves.

No sooner had the disarmed garrison marched from the fort to the entrenched camp than the Indians came looking for scalps, rum, and other plunder. Sick men, unable to leave their beds, were butchered, and the French guards could not keep the bloodthirsty savages out of the English camp, where they terrified the many women and children by handling their long hair which would furnish highly prized scalps. Bougainville wrote, "At last, at nine o'clock in the evening order seemed restored. The Marquis even induced the Indians to promise that besides the escort agreed upon in the capitulation, two chiefs for each tribe should accompany, the English on their way to Fort Edward." At ten that evening Bougainville was on his way down Lake George with a message of victory to Montreal so that he did not see what ensued.

At dawn on August 10, the English, not without reason fearing the Canadians hardly less than the Indians, assembled before the arrival of their escort of 300 regulars. Montcalm would have done well to call out all his regulars as guards, since they alone could be depended upon. At five o'clock the Indians dragged seventeen wounded men from a hut where

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Miles Whitworth, an English surgeon, had tended them, and before his eyes, and without protest from La Corne, other Canadian officers, and a French guard who were present, tomahawked and scalped all of them.

On the advice of French officers, Monro let the Indians have the bag- gage to appease them, but it seemed only to make matters worse. Just how many were killed is not known with certainty, though Levis saw fifty corpses not counting the sick and wounded who had been slaughtered. Montcalm and his chief officers recovered more than 400 prisoners from the Indians that day but they carried off another 200 to Montreal. Some refugees drifted in stripped and exhausted to Fort Edward where canon were fired at intervals to guide them. Women, children, and others res- cued from the savages at Fort William Henry, were assembled at the intrenched camp, and on August 1 5 they were marched under guard to Fort Edward.

The British held that since the terms of the capitulation were broken, they were not bound by it, even though Montcalm and his chief officers had risked their lives in belated efforts to restore order. No doubt Bou- gainville expressed the feelings of his fellow officers, when he wrote, "Detestable position! of which nobody who has not been in it can have any idea, and which makes victory itself a sorrow to the victors." Even so it must be said that in failing to use all the means at his disposal for the protection of his helpless prisoners, Montcalm had gambled with the lives and safety of those to whom he had guaranteed safe conduct.

Meanwhile, at Fort William Henry, French soldiers tore down the bar- racks and heaped logs and bodies to form a huge funeral pyre that blazed all night. Short of provisions, Montcalm forebore to attack Webb and sailed away down Lake George on August 16, leaving the wilderness once more in possession of the wolves, with the ruined fort and the smouldering pyre a grim scar in that setting of primitive beauty.

With Fort William Henry gone, the French held all the northern sec- tion of the Great Warpath. Fort Edward was the most advanced English outpost on the frontier, and Webb, for a time, despite the arrival of upwards of 10,000 militia, was frantic for fear Montcalm would attack it. Almost unchecked, French Indians "swept the forest trails and border hamlets, resistless and merciless . . . carrying dismay to the scattering set- tlements along the New England boundary" and making almost useless for transportation or travel the military road through Warren County. On this note ended the campaign of 1757 — a complete failure for the English and Colonials and the subject of bitter criticism in America and England.

During the winter it was deemed advisable to strengthen the hardy corps of rangers under the intrepid Rogers in order that all possible pro-

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tection might be afforded the frontier and the line of communications from Fort Edward to Lake George. Rogers, now a major, often used the Seven Mile Post at Halfway Brook as his base of operations. Among the officers who accompanied him on bold forays, or led detachments on their own, were Captains Israel Putnam and John Stark. "Remember Fort William Henry!" became their cry.

Since Loudoun planned to attack Forts Frederick and Carillon at Crown Point and Ticonderoga, Major Rogers and bands of his men spent the winter scouting. They traveled through Warren County repeatedly, using the military road to Fort William Henry and thence down Lake George, to harass the enemy and bring back information. Late in Decem- ber 1757, Rogers took two French soldiers from Captain Hebecourt's garrison at Fort Carillon, killed more than a dozen cattle close to the fort, and left this note tied to a horn of one of them: " I am obliged to you, sir, for the rest you have allowed me to take and the fresh meat you have sent me. I shall take good care of my prisoners. My compliments to the Marquis of Montcalm."

On March 10, 1758, Rogers, with a detail of 180 rangers and officers, received orders from Colonel William Haviland, commandant at Fort Edward, to scout the French position at Fort Carillon, seek any signs of coming activity, and harass the enemy in any way possible. Legend says that when the already famous ranger told Haviland the French were watching his movements very closely and that 400 men were needed for the expedition, the commander refused, because he disliked Rogers. If he did so, the refusal undoubtedly reflected the contempt of regular officers for any suggestion from a colonial officer.

That night the little detail camped at Halfway Brook. The weather grew bitter cold; the snow was deep. Resting without fires in the day- time, they made their way down the ice of Lake George in two fatiguing night marches. On the morning of the 13th Rogers decided to leave the lake and for better protection proceed through the snowbound forests to the west of the mountain now known as Rogers Rock.

Whether the French had learned about the approach of the Rangers from a deserter whom Rogers mentioned later, or from prisoners, or from Indian scouts who had watched him from a mountain top, or whether it was through the sorcery of a medicine man who had just arrived at Fort Carillon with 200 Indians, they had certainly prepared such a reception as befitted so dreaded a foe. Rogers, too, was on the alert, and when his flankers reported a hundred Indians advancing up Trout Brook through the four feet of snow that covered its frozen surface, he ordered his men to hide and hold their fire till they could wreak terrible havoc on the enemy at the first volley.

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Half the Rangers in hot pursuit of the fifty surviving Indians soon encountered the main body of French and Indians variously estimated at from 250 to 700. Leaving fifty dead behind, the pursuing Rangers fell back to join their comrades. The entire company then retreated up the mountain slope, fighting desperately from tree to tree. In danger of being outflanked, Rogers dispatched Lieutenant Phillips with all the men he could spare to cut off the passage to his rear. Phillips was surrounded and, though he surrendered under a promise of protection, the Indians, enraged at their losses, tied him and his men to trees and hacked them to death.

Rogers and the remnant of his force made a last ditch stand in the lengthening shadows of the declining day. Often the fighting was hand to hand. A ranger who fell wounded or exhausted was tomahawked at once. Finally, under cover of darkness, those who were still able fled singly or in small groups toward Lake George. Since they had snowshoes, the deep snow aided the escape of a small number, including Rogers.

Among the many legends that surround this bold leader is one that he fled from the encounter to the summit, then named Mt. Pelee, above Trout Brook, where a cliff slopes abruptly into the waters of Lake George some hundreds of feet below. One story is that he slid down the precipice in safety, a truly superhuman feat. Another is that he tossed over his pack, and back-tracked on reversed snowshoes so that his pursurers thought he had made the fatal leap, and descending a nearby path, picked up his pack. Then the superstitious Indians, who saw him jauntily mush- ing away up the lake, thought he must be a god and feared to follow him. At all events, the hill is now called Rogers Rock and its steep face, Rogers Slide.

Suffering terribly without their greatcoats, blankets, and knapsacks, the retreating survivors, some wounded, were met near the Narrows on the evening of the fourteenth by a relief detachment under Captain Stark. The English loss was 125 killed, the French at least as heavy. Some authorities claim the dead reached a total of 300. Certainly this Battle on Snowshoes was a bloody engagement, perhaps the bloodiest skirmish of the French and Indian war.

With the approach of spring the great William Pitt, a power in the British ministry, announced that the campaign of 1758 would be pushed with all energy to avenge the humiliations of the previous year. He removed Loudoun and Webb, but, yielding to some influence at court, retained as commander in chief the third of that inept trio, Abercromby. Pompous, fat, regarded by his men as old though he was but fifty-two, Abercromby was entirely unsuited to lead an army into the wilderness of Lake George and Champlain. Probably aware of this, Pitt appointed as

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second in command a really able young soldier, George Augustus, Lord Howe. But Pitt could not control fate, and the bodies of 2,000 brave men, piled in the woods at Ticonderoga, bore awful testimony to Aber- cromby's failure in a crisis.

During April preparations went rapidly forward. Abercromby selected Amherst and Wolfe to lead an attack on Louisburg and Forbes to push against Fort Duquesne. He himself would advance on Carillon and Crown Point, the French controls on that "military key to the Continent," the Great Warpath through Warren County. The Colonies were asked to supply 20,000 men. Animated by liberal crown subsidies and the energy displayed by the King's officers, they forgot their bitter criticism of the last campaign and on the whole responded with spirit.

Howe reached Fort Edward on May 8 with a large part of the expedi- tionary force. He immediately began to make a study of the area and, with a democracy very unusual to the times, learned woodland warfare from such Colonial stalwarts as Colonel Lyman, Major Rogers, and Captains Putnam and Stark. He had a grasp of the situation such as Abercromby never possessed and while he lived was, as Pitt intended, the real commander of the expedition in everything but name.

On May 20 Lord Howe encamped with a force of 2,000 men on the Garrison Ground at Halfway Brook; and on the 22nd he reached the ruins of Fort William Henry. Here during June was assembled the largest army ever gathered together in America up to that time, 6,367 regulars, 9,034 Provincials. "The shores, the foot of mountains and the broken plains between them were studded thick with tents." Among the veteran regiments present was the noted Black Watch or 42nd Highlanders.

On the evening of July 4 Abercromby gave the command for embarka- tion to advance on Ticonderoga; stores and ammunition were loaded during the night and the next morning the whole vast array was afloat on Lake George. This greatest flotilla of war ever to appear on any American lake consisted of more than a thousand bateaux, whaleboats, and flatboats — an armada six miles long, stretched out in serpentine triple files.

In the late afternoon the cavalcade rested at Sabbath Day Point; at daybreak it reached the foot of the lake. Ahead stretched the forest- covered plain along the outlet of Lake George; on the left reared the bare face of Rogers Rock, from the crest of which a French scouting force under the Canadian officer Langy closely watched the English landing.

Shortly after noon of July 6 the British, with Lord Howe leading one of three columns behind a vanguard under Rogers and Lyman, advanced through the woods on the western bank of the outlet. The bridges leading to the portage and sawmill on the eastern side of the outlet had been

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destroyed by the French. Suddenly Howe's troops, lost in the deep woods, encountered Langy's scouts, who, misjudging the circuitous course nec- essary to avoid their enemy, were also lost in the same forest.

Brisk firing began; Rogers and Lyman turned and caught the French in the rear; only fifty of their 350 men escaped, but they sold their lives dearly. Lord Howe fell in one of the early volleys, a rifle ball through his breast. It was stark tragedy for the British — a needless death resulting from a chance encounter. It bereft Abercromby of his chief adviser, and robbed the army of the one man in whom it reposed confidence. There- after all was confusion, indecision, folly. Deep in the woods the army was ordered to lie on its arms for the night; the next morning Abercromby ordered it back to the landing.

Meanwhile Montcalm was faced with a desperate problem. Mount Defiance, within easy cannon range, commanded his fort, and he could not prevent the British from dragging guns to its summit if they chose to do so. Nor could he stop a detachment from crossing behind him to Lake Champlain to cut off his supplies, and he was provisioned for only a few days. Levis had just arrived with a hundred men, bringing his garri- son up to 3,600, but he could not count on further reinforcements. If invested, the fort must fall soon with all retreat cut off, and enemy can- non could drive him promptly into the narrow limits of the masonry and earthworks of Fort Carillon. Even at the eleventh hour he wavered between fight and flight. It was Abercromby's failure to advance after the death of Lord Howe that brought about Montcalm's fateful decision.

Calling in all his troops, the energetic Marquis set them to work build- ing a massive barricade of logs on the crest of the ridge that crossed the neck of land half a mile in front of the fort. Beyond the barrier for a considerable distance he ordered all the trees cut down and left where they fell, an interlaced, tangled mass. At the base of the log wall Mont- calm arranged a hedgerow of sharpened branches pointing outward. The rest he left to Abercromby's stupidity.

The English commander neither brought up his artillery to breach the French defences nor did he send troops to the shore of Lake Champlain north of Carillon to sit across Montcalm's line of communication and starve him out. Instead, as soon as Bradstreet's corps had repaired the bridges, he advanced along the portage and took post at the sawmill.

At noon of July 8, Abercromby received false information at his saw- mill headquarters that the enemy numbered 6,000 and were expecting reinforcements of another 3,000. On the advice of his engineer and in accord with the wishes of his over-impetuous officers, he issued orders to take the barricade by assault. It could not be done. The fallen trees

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slowed up the advance, broke the ranks. The hidden defenders, urged on by such skilled leaders as Montcalm, Levis, and Bourlamaque, poured in a murderous direct fire and cross-fire.

All this stood revealed in the first attack. But the blundering British general failed to change his orders. For six hours, through six attacks, he allowed his furiously fighting troops to pile their bodies grotesquely on the logs, branches, and stakes of Montcalm's terrible abatis. Not until evening shadows lengthened did he draw off his soldiers, defeated, with a loss of nearly 2,000 dead, wounded and missing. The Black Watch was almost wiped out in fierce attacks, and Major Campbell, who had been told by the ghost of a cousin he had wronged that he would die at Ticon- deroga, lay near death with a shattered arm.

Montcalm drew a deep sigh of relief: the first round was won. The English, he believed, would now bring up their cannon. After all they still outnumbered him four to one. His surprise when scouts reported the enemy gone can be imagined. Apparently panic-stricken at the blood bath he had caused, Abercromby was in full retreat toward his camp at the head of Lake George.

Here he ordered entrenchments thrown up with all haste and behind them sat himself down for the rest of the season. Exultant French raid- ers, under the well known bushrangers La Corne, Marin, and Courte- manche, added to his humiliation by continually harassing the English camp, cutting off supplies and communications by way of the military road to Fort Edward, and massacring wagon train convoys. So weighted down with defeat was Abercromby that it was only to be rid of Brad- street's importunings that he allowed that Colonial officer to march off to Fort Frontenac, where his boldness and skill won a signal victory.

At last the Canadian and Indian forays became so irksome that a pali- saded enclosure known as Fort Williams was built near the southern end of French Mountain. Another such picket fort, Four Mile Post, was erected on the road between present-day Glens Falls and Hudson Falls. In addition a large force was installed at Halfway Brook, just north of Glens Falls. These measures, along with a victory of Rogers over Marin at Fort Anne, tended to reduce the effectiveness of the French guerrilla warfare and may be counted as the only gains of an expedition begun on a plane of exalted promise.

While the French center held firm at Ticonderoga, the right and left wings crumpled under the blows of abler generals — Amherst and Wolfe at Louisburg, Forbes at Fort Duquesne, and Bradstreet at Fort Frontenac. These defeats seriously affected the French morale, and internal strife spread in Canada.

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The northern English colonies, bitterly disappointed by the repulse of Abercromby, rallied their flagging hopes at the news that Lord Jeffrey Amherst, victor of Louisburg, would be commander in chief in 1759 and lead the "grand central advance against Ticonderoga and Crown Point." Once more they stretched their lean resources to provide men and money.

Much reconnoitering by Rogers and his Rangers and the usual bloody raids by flying squadrons of Canadians and Indians signaled the advent of spring. Amherst, to protect his line of march, ordered Major West to Four Mile Post in May, and in June sent a larger detachment to build a log-walled fort at Halfway Brook. Completed on June 21, 17 5 9, it stood across the road from the old Seven Mile Post and later became known as Fort Amherst. The line of communications protected, General Thomas Gage marched to Lake George with the vanguard of the main army and threw up or strengthened fortifications, which have since been called Fort Gage, on a hill west of the ruins of Fort William Henry.

In June, Amherst arrived at Fort Edward with all his forces. A stern disciplinarian, the general ordered constant drilling and exercises for the Colonial militia, severe punishment for insubordination, and death to deserters. As a salutary lesson four executions took place with the entire army drawn up on parade, and one Burk, " for abusing and offering to strike his officer at Halfway Brook," received 400 lashes, 30 before each regiment, except Schuyler's, where the poor wretch got 40 lashes.

At the same time Amherst also took strong measures to suppress the massacring and scalping of women and children that had long character- ized American border warfare. Issuing an order to his own scouts to take no scalps under any circumstances, he served notice on Vaudreuil that he would "revenge it by the death of two men of the enemy, for every woman or child murdered by them."

As June waned, " that valley by the head of Lake George which for five years past had been the annual mustering-place of armies" echoed again to the din and clang of arms as 5,000 regulars and an equal number of militia made camp. While Amherst waited for his artillery to come up he kept his troops busy, a procedure he invariably followed, by directing Colonel James Montressor to construct Fort George. Only the southwest bastion was ever completed.

On the 21st of July Amherst moved down the lake in a pageant remin- iscent of Abercromby, along the route of that ill-starred general. Rogers' Rangers, again in the van, pushed rapidly forward the next morning to drive the French from the rising ground since called Mount Hope. On the 23rd the English moved toward the barricade against which the waves

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of Abercromby's assault broke so terribly the year before. The entrench- ments were undefended.

Bourlamaque, in command of the fort, under orders to retire on the slightest danger of being trapped, decided the same night to withdraw his army, leaving only 400 men under Captain Hebecourt to delay the enemy. On the 26th this detachment set mines, which failed to blow up more than one bastion of the fort, and retreated. Above the sulphurous glow the white flag of France was left flying.

In the morning of July 27, 1759, the French flag was hauled down "and for the first time in its dark and bloody history, the red cross of St. George flaunted its silken folds above the blackened and grim battle- ments of Carillon," now renamed Ticonderoga. On August 1, Amherst received word that Crown Point was abandoned by the enemy: the French center, so long a thorn in the side of the English, was broken at last; a surge of joy and relief swept like a hurricane across the northern English colonies.

For France the debacle followed fast. In September 1759, Quebec fell to Wolfe; on September 8, 1760, Vaudreuil surrendered Montreal to Am- herst and later signed a full capitulation for Canada. By the terms of the Peace of Paris, February 10, 1763, Canada became a British possession.

Revolution

t I *HE Peace of Paris, ending the French and Indian War, reduced to a minimum the long existing danger of bloody Indian raids on the JL. northern frontier of New York and New England. At once the colonizing genius of England envisioned the wilderness border turned into productive farms and thriving villages. Large grants of land were made and in less than ten years from the close of the war, speculators were reaping a rich harvest and stout-hearted British pioneers were hew- ing a pathway to freedom in Warren County.

Hardly were they well settled when the disturbances of the Revolution began to invade their primitive domain. Although many were peace- loving Quakers, some nurtured rebel sympathies, while others had Tory leanings. Indeed, as Holden points out in his History of Queensbury, they were swept by the ground swell presaging a storm which was surging up from the Atlantic seaboard to fall with sharp and unmerited severity upon the non-combatants of these border towns.

In 1767 the Crown abrogated the powers of the rebellious New York Assembly. At the same time General Thomas Gage, his Majesty's com- mander in chief in North America, demonstrated to the new frontier the dangers inherent in revolt by taking steps to place Ticonderoga, Crown Point and Fort George on a war footing. Bitterness and blows between New York and the Hampshire Grants over land patents, a disputed por- tion of which extended to the shores of Lake George, added to the general insecurity.

Rumors of political strife and rebel activity stirred every conversation. Whigs on the border formed societies akin to the Sons of Liberty. Often neighbors and even members of the same family took opposing sides on the question of resistance to the Stamp Act, Mutiny Act, and similar decrees of the British Parliament.

The strife between Whig and Tory even reached into the family of Quaker Abraham Wing, and tore it asunder. He and his sons adhered strictly to their religious tenets enjoining peace, and there is no evidence that they sided with either faction. Possibly they felt that this was the best way to insure possession of their lands. But it was certainly a desire to protect their titles to royal patents that influenced many settlers to remain loyal to the King.

Such a loyalist was Daniel Jones, husband of Abraham Wing's daugh- ter, Deborah. He had worked in partnership with his father-in-law to build mills using the water power of Wing's Falls, later renamed Glens

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Falls. He also owned land in both Kingsbury and Queensbury and was a man of importance among the pioneers. His brother David was the fiance of Jane McCrea, the beautiful girl whose murder by Indian raiders, incited by the Tories, helped to arouse the country side against General Burgoyne and contributed to his defeat at Saratoga. After the fall of Ticonderoga and Fort George, Queensbury was no safe place for Tories, so Daniel Jones fled with his family to Montreal, and David joined the Loyalist army to become a captain under Burgoyne.

James Higson and Andrew Lewis, on the other hand, were uncom- promising Whigs. With their wives, Content and Mary, daughters of Abraham Wing, they were seized in 1777 by Tory and Indian raiders and carried to Montreal. Though the men were forced to run the gauntlet by their Indian captors, Daniel Jones and other kinfolk of theirs among the Loyalist refugees were able to befriend and protect them while they were held in Canada.

William Robards, a prominent land owner in Queensbury, and his brother-in-law Andrew Fuller were also captured with Higson and Lewis. Fuller remained a prisoner for the duration of the war but Robards, a bold and hardy pioneer, broke through a boarded window in his prison and fled through the streets of the old French section of Montreal. None of the shots aimed at him by pursuing guards took effect and, encouraged by cheering Canadians, he jumped the city wall and disappeared into the forest. After a grim and hazardous journey through the wilderness, sleeping by day and traveling by the stars, he reached Lake George, found a canoe, and finally arrived home safe, but so gaunt and ragged that his overjoyed wife fainted when she saw him.

Even before the stand of the embattled farmers at Lexington and Con- cord an agent was sent by the revolutionists to Canada to report on the feelings of the people toward the revolutionary party. Apparently sensing the importance of the capture of Ticonderoga in the molding of public opinion, this agent suggested that on the outbreak of war Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, who were already well known for their bold resistance to New York in the land controversy, be engaged to seize the fortress.

Accordingly, Connecticut, on April 28, 1775, dispatched a small body of men, one of whom was Colonel Barnard Romans, to join forces with Ethan Allen for the dangerous enterprise. On May 3, Massachusetts commissioned Benedict Arnold to lead an expedition having the same design. When the hard-grained Green Mountain Boys refused to follow any other leader than their own, Arnold and Allen, having arranged a joint command, surprised and captured the Fort on May 10, 1775.

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Another detachment of thirty men of the Connecticut expedition under Captain Herrick made a rapid march to capture Skenesborough, now Whitehall, a settlement founded and controlled by Philip Skene, an ex-major of the British army. In 1773 Skene had formulated and dis- patched to the King a grandiose scheme to set up all northern New York and part of Vermont into a separate province with Skenesborough as capital and Skene as governor. The plan was under consideration when his capture put an end to the ex-major's "ambitious machinations."

Two days after the capture of Ticonderoga and Skenesborough Colonel Romans at the head of a little company of Connecticut soldiers arrived at Fort Edward. Adding a few local patriots as reinforcements to his detail, Romans on May 12 marched against Fort George at the head of Lake George. The only Britishers there, Captain John Nordberg, inva- lided from the English army, and two assistants, who merely expedited messages and expresses between Albany and Montreal, offered no resist- ance. On this same day Crown Point fell to Seth Warner, a colleague of Ethan Allen.

According to a local tradition, Colonel Romans enlisted for his expedi- tion Daniel Parks, member of a family who owned considerable land on the Hudson River across from Hudson Falls and Glens Falls. Parks now lies buried in an almost forgotten family plot on a bluff above the river opposite Hudson Falls. A badly worn inscription on his headstone affirms "he was the man that took the key from the British officer at Lake George."

In June 1775, General Philip Schuyler was appointed by Washington to take command of the Army of the North. By possession of Fort George, Ticonderoga, and Crown Point he controlled the Great Warpath, the military trail from Albany to Montreal. But his widely scattered, undisciplined militia had little strength elsewhere along the border. Clashes between hot-tempered groups of Whigs and Tories were frequent, and daring outlaw bands roved the countryside. In one instance they even tried to disrupt court sessions at Fort Edward.

On September 4 General Richard Montgomery marched from Crown Point for an attack on Canada. About the same time an expedition of hardy frontiersmen under Benedict Arnold was organized in New Eng- land. After an incredible march up the Kennebec River and through the wilderness, they made a junction at Quebec with Montgomery c As the year 1775 came to a close the Americans captured St. Johns on the Richelieu River and took Montreal, but failed in their attack on Quebec.

While the American army lay encamped in Canada, the Continental Congress, on the suggestion of General Schuyler, sent Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll as ministers to treat with our northern

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neighbor. Other members of the party were the Reverend Father John Carroll, brother of Charles, and afterward first archbishop of Baltimore who acted as the party's interpreter in Canada; Baron de Woedtke, a Prussian major on the staff of Frederick the Great, on his way to join the American army; and General John Thomas, about to become commander of the Revolutionary troops in Canada.

On April 18, 1776, the party arrived at Wing's Tavern in Queensbury on the old Military Road from Fort Edward and the next day continued their journey northward by way of Lake George. Failing in their purpose, the ministers later returned to Ticonderoga. Meanwhile, the American forces, racked by smallpox, that dread scourge of the armies of earlier days, retreated to the mouth of the Richelieu. Here General Thomas died of the fearful plague.

Faced by superior enemy forces the smallpox-shattered remnant of the American army in Canada began a masterly retreat in June under the command of General John Sullivan. In July boatloads of half-starved, vermin-infested smallpox sufferers streamed up Lake George en route to hastily erected hospitals below the outworks of Fort George. Among the hundreds of bodies at rest in unmarked graves in Battleground Park is that of Baron de Woedtke.

During the opening months of 1776 the pioneers of Warren County had begun to feel the pinch of unpaid army requisitions and to have their possessions plundered by detachments of Americans en route between frontier posts. In an affidavit made before Adiel Sherwood, justice of the peace, and lieutenant of Kingsbury and Queensbury Continental Militia, Abraham Wing sought to charge Captain Marien Lamar with "things his company stole" including "one blue Broadcloth Jactcoat. one blue quilted petticoat, 13 Dunghill fowls and one pleasure slay steel shod, painted green outside, red inside . . . worth at that time in hard cash, seven pounds."

In answer the captain certified that "the slay was hired for use of my company from the 13th of March to the first of April, 1776, when, the ice breaking up, I was obliged to leave her in the care 01 Mr. Belton at Willsborough on Lake Champlain." Nor was this the end of Wing's losses. On July 18, by military order of Nathaniel Buell, quartermaster general at Fort George, he gave up "15 saws, with their stearups on." These, taken to Cheshire's mill near Fort Edward, aided in sawing lumber for the American forces.

General Schuyler, sent by the Continental Congress on December 30, 1775 to seize the arms and stores of the Tories in Tryon County and "to apprehend their chiefs," soon reached Johnstown with a strong armed

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force. There he paroled instead of arresting Sir John Johnson, successor to the title and estates of his illustrious father, Sir William, who had died as the storm clouds of the Revolution gathered. Whether or not Sir John had been released from his parole is a matter of controversy, but at all events, secretly warned that he was to be arrested, he fled to Canada in March 1776, with a large band of royalists and Indians.

This journey, begun in winter and ended while spring thaws swelled the streams and rendered snowshoes useless, was the first penetration by a large party of white men into the heart of the Adirondack mountains. They followed the valley of the Sacandaga to the Hudson and thence northward through what are now the towns of Luzerne, Stony Creek, Thurman and Johnsburg, then a dense, uninhabited wilderness crossed only by an Indian trail. After nineteen days of terrible toil and hardship, the party finally reached the St. Lawrence and safety in Canada. Shortly thereafter, Sir John, commissioned a colonel, organized his retainers and the Tory refugees in Canada into a regiment known as "Johnson's Greens," who later engaged in border warfare.

At this time Sir Guy Carleton made plans to advance with a powerful fleet hastily assembled, capture Ticonderoga, and wrest control of the Great Warpath from the wavering grasp of the Colonies. With almost superhuman skill and energy Benedict Arnold built and armed the first tiny vessels of the American navy at Skenesborough and Ticonderoga. At the Battle of Valcour Island, October 11, 1776, his little flotilla was almost annihilated by Carleton though most of the American soldiers got back to Ticonderoga in safety. Crown Point had to be abandoned to the British, but not before Arnold had inflicted such losses during the naval engagement that the delayed and harried Carleton postponed further southward invasion. Though they actually paved the way for Burgoyne's surrender a year later, this and other defeats suffered repeatedly in the early days of the Revolution brought gloom to Patriot militia and Whigs on the frontier, a gloom relieved little by enthusiasm over the Declara- tion of Independence.

In the spring of 1777 scouting parties of Indians allied to the British were busy along the northern border. In March a detail of eighty red men and Tories fought a bloody skirmish at Sabbath Day Point with a scouting detail of fifty Continentals. Despite loss of half their own num- ber the Indians and Loyalists captured 1 8 Americans, who, according to a report of Captain Alexander Baldwin of the Independent Company of Rangers, were "conducted thro' the wood to Montreal, and obliged to carry the packs of the Indians, and upon their arrival there were confined in the Recollec Church where they remained about six weeks. That while there, they were every day insulted by John Cobham, Thomas Mann,

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David Jones, Ebenezer Jessup, and divers others, all Americans who had gone over to the enemy." This was David Jones, the betrothed of Jane McCrea. Ebenezer Jessup with his brother Edward, held claim to Jessup's Patent in and around the present Luzerne.

By May the propaganda and ravages of the Tories in Warren County and vicinity became bold and open. Apparently informed by Indian run- ners that the long-awaited invasion from Canada was on its way, they welcomed the opportunity to harass frontier homes and settlements and gave free rein to such fierce hatreds as only civil wars unleash.

One of the most daring acts of violence of the Royalists resulted in the abandonment of the little settlement of Parks' Mills, located across the Hudson from Wing's Falls. The story, pieced together from history and tradition, tells of the attack on the home of Daniel Parks, Sr., 7 5 -year old founder of Parks' Mills, by a Tory band led by Richardson, supposed to have been debtor to Parks in a land purchase, and Ferguson, a tavern keeper from the Bend, a settlement a few miles up the river. After killing the old pioneer and burning his home the Tories ambushed three of his sons who came to aid their father. Of these they mortally wounded Elisha and captured Isaac.

Daniel Parks, Jr., who had helped Colonel Romans in the capture of Fort George escaped the ambush and gathered the settlers not already made captive. With them he fled down the river to the present Fenimore, where they crossed the stream, probably on a ferry operated by the Parks family, to Sandy Hill. According to one story, several women, detached from the main party, were accosted by Indian members of the Tory band but escaped by telling the red men that a child they carried had smallpox.

The morning following the Parks Massacre, as it is called in Holden's History of Queensbury, a party of Whigs followed the trail of the Tories and Indians along the south bank of the Hudson and across the river at its confluence with the Sacandaga. However, the Loyalists, finding they were pursued, took to the bed of Stony Creek and threw off their pursu- ers. It was learned later that the Whig captives had been promised death at the hands of the Tory raiders if they were overtaken.

The chief base of operations and gathering place for the Loyalists was the colony of the politically-favored Jessup brothers on the Hudson near the present Corinth and Luzerne. Ebenezer and Edward Jessup, shrewd business men and among the sharpest and most colorful land speculators ever to live in Warren County, began their settlement west of Queensbury about 1771, building homes and mills and living in a style far above their neighbors. They spent lavishly at Wing's Tavern and filled their spacious log dwelling with elegant furniture and costly paintings, covered their tables with imported linens, and dined from massive silver plate.

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In 1774 the brothers accomplished their biggest land grab, the Totten and Crossfield Purchase, encompassing 800,000 acres in the south-central Adirondacks, for it is said that Ebenezer Jessup engineered this mammoth grant, Totten and Crossfield being merely dummies. Indeed until their lands were confiscated, the Jessups held title to practically all of what is now western and northern Warren County.

It is not strange that such land barons, enjoying the favor of the Royal Government and already living in the luxurious style of aristocrats, op- posed the changes inherent in the Revolution. Nor is it surprising that their influence and patronage brought into the Loyalist camp such noted Tories as Richardson and Ferguson, leaders in the attack on Parks' Mills; the six Lovelace brothers, descendants of Governor Lovelace, one of whom was hanged about 1780 as a spy; the numerous Fairchilds who resided on the Hudson near the present Luzerne Mountains; and many of their retainers and tenants.

On May 6, 1777, Colonel Gordon in command of the Continental Militia in the Ballston Spa district, pursued and captured 3 1 Tories on or near Jessup's Patent. All admitted they were on their way to join Bur- goyne and thus escape taking the oath of allegiance to Congress. Local tradition has it that at this time Edward Jessup, hotly pursued, made good his escape by leaping across a gorge in the Hudson where the stream then measured but twelve feet in width. Blasting away of rocks during the lumber era to permit passage of logs has widened it.

Jessup then made his way across Queensbury by an old road that paralleled the present route from French Mountain to Fort Ann, and thence northward through Skenesborough to Burgoyne's camp at Wills- borough Falls. Here he joined his brother, Ebenezer, who had fled Whig fury some months earlier and had received a commission in Burgoyne's regiment. After the war the Jessups received royal land grants in Canada, where their descendants became people of wealth and influence.

A little before the Battle of Saratoga, General Gates, who had replaced Schuyler in command of the Patriot army in the Northern Department, dispatched militia under Lieutenant Ellis, to raid the Jessup colony. The Loyalist leaders had long since fled, but the lieutenant's troopers destroyed their homes, burned the grain fields, and left nothing standing but the mills. The dwellings of the Jessups had previously been pillaged and their elegant and expensive fittings carried away. Soon the site of the once bustling settlement was growing up to weeds and bushes, the abandoned clearings becoming again a part of the wilderness from which they had been wrested by the toil of the pioneer followers of the Jessup brothers.

Burgoyne's invasion, designed to secure for the English control of that bloody pathway of the French and Indian War through Lakes Champlain

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and George and the Hudson River, was intended to separate New York from New England, the hotbed of the rebellion. The British commander, despite a broad strain of pomposity and overconfidence, was an able and experienced officer. His staff boasted skilled and capable leaders, several of them, including himself, members of Parliament.

Burgoyne led a force of more than 10,000 men, well armed and equipped, with at least 7,000 veteran troops, an artillery corps, Hessian mercenaries, and detachments of Canadians. To oppose this array Gen- eral Schuyler could muster at the various frontier posts, including Fort George, less than 5,000 militia, raw recruits, miserably clad and armed, some actually barefooted, and most of them ragged.

As the British sailed down Lake Champlain, the Americans retreated southward without opposing their advance. Near the mouth of the Boquet River, on June 21, Burgoyne accepted the services of 400 Indians and celebrated with a great war dance. Naturally humane, he tried "to soften their ferocity, and restrain their thirst for blood." Little acquainted with the unpredictable children of the forest, he could not foresee how they would help to encompass his ruin.

On June 26 the English occupied Crown Point and, on July 2, arrived at Ticonderoga. Here the Americans had fondly believed the invasion would be halted because the fort was impregnable. In truth it had been falling for some years into a sad state of disrepair. When, on July 5, General Arthur St. Clair, American commander, looked up into the mouths of British cannon on Mt. Defiance to the southwest overlooking the fort, an emplacement never before attempted, he knew that he must lose no time in evacuating Ticonderoga.

This he accomplished the following night under cover of darkness and his departure might not have been discovered at once, except for the burning, in direct disobedience to orders, of the commanders' headquar- ters at Mount Independence, across the floating bridge from Ticonderoga. Burgoyne promptly began to pursue the retreating Americans who split into two sections, the main body crossing the bridge to Vermont while the remainder, with the sick and the women, fled southward on Lake Champlain toward Skenesborough.

The American retreat was conducted with considerable skill. St. Clair's rear guard, frontiersmen under Colonels Warner and Francis, suffered losses in a delaying engagement at Hubbardton with the British and Hes- sians of Fraser and Riedesel. The thin line of sharp-shooting Americans broke out of the woods and did heavy execution on the close ranks of the enemy, but were driven back by sheer weight of numbers. When the victors closed in for the kill, however, frontiersmen scattered and disap-

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peared into the forests in an American military maneuver that came as a complete surprise to the European officers.

Pursued by a British flotilla on Lake Champlain, the fleeing Americans were not given time to destroy their boats under the guns of Skenes- borough before Burgoyne occupied the town, captured the guns and baggage, and dispatched Colonel Hill with the 9th British regiment in pursuit. Overtaken at Fort Anne, Colonel Long with many sick and convalescents among his untrained militia resisted desperately until his ammunition gave out. Setting fire to the fortress, he continued the retreat toward Fort Edward.

From Fort Edward, on July 9, the anxious Schuyler wrote Washington: "I have not been able to learn what is become of General St. Clair, and the army. The enemy followed the troops that came to Skenesborough as far as Fort Anne, where they were yesterday repulsed; notwithstanding which, Colonel Long, contrary to my express orders evacuated that post. I am here at the head of a handful of men, not above fifteen hundred, without provision, with little ammunition, not above five rounds to a man, having neither balls, nor lead to make any; the country in the deepest consternation; no carriages to remove the stores from Fort George, which I expect to learn every moment is attacked." Schuyler's forebod- ings were relieved somewhat on July 12 when St. Clair marched into Fort Edward with the main body of his forces intact.

In spite of these reinforcements Schuyler was still unable to give adequate protection to the countryside. Bands of Indians and Tories, operating from Skenesborough, raided far and wide, hanging and scalping suspected Whig sympathizers, burning homes, and frequently attacking neutrals. Secret Tory nests at Halfway Brook and in Kingsbury provided spies and carriers of messages between Burgoyne and Sir William Howe, who, according to plan, was to march up the Hudson Valley for a junc- tion of their forces at Albany.

Communication between the leaders of the armies to the north and south was so vital to the success of the British campaign that Schuyler at this time received instructions from the Committee of Safety to use a spy in counter-espionage against the Tory secret agents. With the aid of an ardent Whig named Fish at Old Saratoga, Schuyler got in touch with Moses Harris of Dutchess County who lived to become a Warren County patriarch, founder of Harrisena.

General Schuyler found young Moses to be a reliable man of sharp wits and a true patriot who would hesitate at nothing in the service of his country. Moreover, as a favorite nephew of the notorious leader of the Tory ring in Kingsbury, Gilbert Harris, whom he had often visited before

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the war, Moses could enter unsuspected into the enemy camp. To start his career as a double spy, Moses visited his Uncle Gil, expressed disgust with the progress of the Revolution, and pretended that he would like to join the British army if nothing better offered.

Delighted at finding in Moses so promising a Loyalist recruit, Uncle Gilbert consulted Joseph Bettys, the British espionage agent, and took Moses to the Tory underground hideout at Halfway Brook in Kingsbury. There, really acting as an American spy, Moses falsely swore loyalty to the King, and accepted dispatches for delivery to William Shepherd, a Tory living near Albany.

Now that he was accepted by both sides as a spy, Moses set off down the Hudson and at night arrived secretly at the home of Fish, his Ameri- can helper in Saratoga, now named Schuylerville. There he waited while Fish took the dispatches to General Schuyler to read, and brought them back promptly. Then Moses could deliver them to Shepherd without arousing British suspicion.

Naturally this double dealing more than doubled the dangers of the American agent. Hot-blooded young Tories, envious of his position and influence, threatened his life. When the British command scented a leak, Moses was suspected. Only stout insistence on his loyalty to the King saved him death at the hands of Tories who hauled him off to an island in a big swamp west of Queensbury for questioning.

Their confidence in him restored, the British allowed Moses to resume his duties. To reassure the Tories he was "arrested" in Albany by order of General Schuyler, lodged in jail, and after several days permitted to escape. He then fled to Canada where he was received as a hero by the Tories in exile. But since this episode convinced the Whigs also that Moses was really a British spy, it added a fresh peril. Bands of Patriots attempted to intercept him and one, Jacob Bensen, asserted that he would " put a ball through the cussed Tory " on sight.

Finally the suspicious Joseph Bettys discovered what Moses was really doing and sought to trap him. Forewarned he fled southward only to be ambushed by a patrol of Whig scouts whom he escaped by crossing the Hudson at Fort Miller. Exhausted, he stumbled into the home of Noah Payne, a Revolutionary sympathizer, to whom he revealed his role of double spy.

Payne helped Moses complete his journey to the home of Fish, whom they found seriously ill. There then was nothing for Moses to do but personally deliver the dispatches to Schuyler. In Albany he called on Shepherd, his erstwhile Tory colleague, who, aware of his duplicity, tried to poison him. Since his usefulness as a spy was obviously ended, Schuyler

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sent Moses Harris to Washington with the papers obtained on his final venture. The general offered to recommend him to the commander in chief for a safer position in the southern army. This the stubborn Harris refused with the assertion " that all the Tories this side of hell should not drive him an inch."

While Burgoyne lingered at Skenesborough and, according to tradition, indulged in "high revel and debauch, which rendered him unfit for his position, and the proper discharge of his duties," Schuyler improved the opportunity to save the cannon and powder at Fort George and destroy or carry off anything that might help the British. "If the enemy will permit me to pass unmolested three days longer to Fort George, I shall be able to bring away all the stores from thence and then draw off the few troops we have there," wrote the American commander as he pressed settlers and their wagons, horses and oxen into this service.

Schuyler's masterly withdrawal was finding little favor in the Colonies, because of the false, though wide-spread, belief that the northern frontier forts were massive works against which the British would beat in vain. Congress severely criticized both St. Clair and Schuyler, and New Eng- land members continually sought to have Gates placed in command of the Northern Department.

Even General Washington seems to have lacked adequate information on the situation. Before the Fort George abandonment he wrote Schuyler that he understood "that a spirited, brave, judicious officer with two or three hundred good men, together with the armed vessels you have built, would retard General Burgoyne's passage across the lake for a consider- able distance." Apparently irked by this misconception of the facts the northern army commander replied spiritedly:

"The fort was part of an unfinished bastion of an intended fortifica- tion. The bastion was closed at the gorge. In it was a barrack capable of containing between thirty and fifty men; without ditch, without wall, without cistern; without any picket to prevent an enemy from running over the wall; so small as not to contain over one hundred and fifty men; commanded by ground greatly overlooking it, and within point blank shot. . . . Of the vessels built there, one was afloat and tolerably fitted, the other still upon the stocks; but, if the two had been upon the water, they would have been of little use without rigging or guns."

Schuyler's policy was to strip the country in the path of the enemy of everything useful to an army, leaving only burned homes and abandoned fields. To the frontiersmen of Warren County, who had trusted in Fort George and Fort Edward for protection even after Ticonderoga fell, all seemed lost, and the older settlements farther south were also demanding a firm stand and stubborn fighting instead of strategic withdrawals.

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One person of prominence who understood the desperate measures of Schuyler with his ragged little army was Gouverneur Morris, member of the New York Provincial Congress and ardently devoted to the Revolu- tionary cause. From headquarters in the field he wrote to the Committee of Safety on July 17 announcing the destruction of Fort George and the safe arrival of its garrison and stores at Fort Edward, adding, "I shall give it as my opinion to the general, whenever he asks it, to break up all the settle- ments upon our northern frontier, to drive off the cattle, secure or destroy the forage, etc., and . . . leave nothing but a wilderness to the enemy."

Whether on the advice of Morris or not, Schuyler did, at this time, requisition supplies from the settlements. By his orders Quartermaster General Morgan Lewis seized practically all the horses and cattle, as well as huge quantities of oats, rye, corn, wheat, potatoes, and hay from the farms of Abraham Wing, his son-in-law Benjamin Phineas Babcock, James Higson, Andrew Lewis, Truelove Butler, William Robards, Benedict Brown and many other Warren County pioneers. In addition Abraham Wing's mills were dismantled, "25 Saws . . . and other utensills necessary for the two Mills in Compleat Repair" being carried away. In 1789 the State liquidated claims for these war losses by remitting the quit rents owed on the lands of the claimants for the 2 5 -year period from 1762 to 1787, and relieving them of any future quit rents.

Caught between American foraging and Indian terrorism there was little the non-combatant border settlers could do but seek refuge in southward flight. Most of the pioneers of Queensbury and Caldwell fled to their old homes in The Oblong, Dutchess County. An escort of militia, among them Solomon Parks, son of old Daniel of the Parks Mas- sacre, scoured the countryside for any horses and oxen that might have escaped army requisition. These were for the use of the women and children, \\ nose desire to escape was heightened by the sight of small bands of Indians m war paint dogging the line of flight.

"The roads were filled with fugitives," says one historian, "men, lead- ing little children by the hand, women pressing their infant offspring to their bosoms, hurrying forward in utmost consternation, from the scene of danger. Occasionally passed a cavalcade, two and even three mounted on a single steed, panting under its heavy load; sometimes carrying a mother and her child, while the father ran breathless by the horse's side. Then came a procession of carts drawn by oxen, laden with furniture hastily collected; and here and there, mingling with the crowd of vehicles, was seen many a sturdy husbandman followed by his household and driv- ing his domestic animals before him."

In spite of the dangers from partisan strife and Indian raid in Warren County there is evidence that some few remained there " depending for

84 WARREN COUNTY GUIDE

safety upon their principles of non-resistance and their faith and reliance in God's protection." Among these were Abraham "Wing and his family, for records show that Schuyler on July 26 wrote Major Gray of the Com- missary Department: "I have permitted him [Wing] to remain and consented that he should take back eight of his cows." A little later Colonel Christopher Yates communicated to Wing: "I have considered about your Sons Horse and give him leave to keep the Same until some Higher Power shall order it otherwise. I also grant you leave to keep a hunting gun in your house and forbid any one to take same without orders from the general."

Meanwhile Burgoyne quartered himself at the home of the self-styled Governor Skene and sent to England glowing accounts of his success. He had marched through the Champlain Valley in a week, had taken Crown Point, Ticonderoga, and Skenesborough; he had trounced the rebels in the battles of Hubbardton and Fort Anne. It had been a hard pull at times, but now he had only to walk through that " rabble in arms" down on the Hudson to be in Albany in a few weeks. Through this rosy glow Burgoyne failed to see the impending shadow of disaster in the forest and across the heights of Old Saratoga.

If he had correctly estimated the resistance of the irate farmers aroused by his use of Indian allies, and the transport difficulties through swamp and forest below Skenesborough, Burgoyne would hardly have chosen the route over the Great Carry merely because it was the shorter. His British and Hessian regiments in their brilliant uniforms and heavy equipment, his officers with their wives, his camp followers, his piles of baggage, were a European army, suited to good roads and open fields. But the country- side before them had returned quickly to the wilderness from which, in truth, it had scarcely been wrested. The settlers had fled; their farms, robbed of crops and cattle by the "scorched earth" policy of Schuyler, were growing to weeds. The hundreds of Tories Skene had promised would render aid and comfort, failed to materialize, many being immo- bilized by bands of grim patriots who visited their homes, seized their rifles, and issued stern warnings of dire consequences to follow any assist- ance to Burgoyne.

The march became a nightmare. Schuyler dispatched General Nixon with 600 militia to destroy bridges, to fell trees across the road and to choke narrow places in Wood Creek with logs. Thus was wiped out what little semblance of a highway had ever existed. Heavy-booted grenadiers and infantrymen sank in the mud, tripped over brush, caught bayonets and coattails in thickets, roasted in a green hell in the day time to drop down at night exhausted but restless in a strange, chilly, insect-ridden world.

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When horses died of over- work and hunger, sweating men were forced to tug at cannon ropes. Sadly the officers saw their baggage sent back to Ticonderoga. Ten, fifteen, twenty days passed as the struggling army maintained a snail's pace only by the most back-breaking toil. Where was the Hudson? Was this dark wilderness of great trees that ever pressed in on them and thrust long arms in their path always to be ahead? Even the strongest faltered. Foreign soldiers longed for the open fields and the village streets of their homelands.

When at last, on July 30, that weary procession staggered out of the woods into the valley of the Hudson to see the silver-blue streak of river winding south between green hills, men wept with joy and rushed forward to throw themselves face downward in the blessed water. Little did they know the trials that still lay ahead. Delay in the advance had caused a desperate shortage of provisions. The countryside, stripped by the Ameri- cans as they retreated, provided no forage, and taking Fort Edward was a hollow triumph.

Though Schuyler's foes had scored only an empty victory, it provided occasion for politicians in a vacillating Congress to inveigh against him. The country in general did not yet understand the brilliant strategy of his retirement, and somewhat testily on July 26 he again wrote Wash- ington:

I find by letters from below, that an idea prevails that Fort Ed- ward is a strong and regular fortification. It was once a regular fortification, but there is nothing but the ruins of it left, and they are so utterly defenceless that I have frequently galloped my horse in on one side and out at the other. But when it was in the best condition possible, with the best troops to garrison it, and provided with every necessity, it would not have stood two days' siege after proper batteries had been opened. It is situated in a bottom on the banks of the river, and surrounded with hills from which the parade may be seen within point blank shot. I doubt not that it will be said that Fort Miller, Fort Saratoga, and Stillwater are considerable forti- fications, of neither of which is there a trace left although they still retain their names.

Five days later General Schuyler was ordered replaced and General Horatio Gates assumed the command. Ironically enough the victory that would have vindicated Schuyler was achieved before the tardy Gates joined his troops. Advised by Tories that the rebels were gathering im- mense stores at Bennington, Burgoyne detached the Hessians under Baum to capture them. As they had done at Hubbardton and Fort Anne, the sharp-shooting rebels, swift of foot, led by John Stark, seemed to spring from nowhere upon the heavily equipped, slow-moving Germans to shoot

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them down or take them captive. Unavailing reinforcements com- manded by Baum's colleague, Breyman, suffered heavy losses in a forced retreat. The plight of General Burgoyne and his army daily grew more unenviable.

Washington's proclamation asking help from the northern colonies was posted in every public square and read from every pulpit. From the Hudson, the Green Mountains, and the Valley of the Connecticut, farm- ers and shop keepers flocked to the American army. Indignation because of continued use of Indians to terrorize and burn in Queensbury, Kings- bury, and Fort Edward, was now brought to a climax as the gory tresses of beautiful Jane McCrea's scalp were exhibited in the settlements, at the Wing's Falls home of Content Wing Higson, a close friend of the murdered girl, and in the British camp, where David Jones, her fiance, was a Tory lieutenant. Instead of striking fear to the hearts of the colon- ists, who remembered only too well the redskin raids of the French and Indian War, it hardened and crystallized the patriot sentiments of an angry people, and sometimes drove the neutral or lukewarm to take a definite stand against Englishmen who, through their allies, warred on women and children. And when, too late, Burgoyne took his Indians to task and denounced their wanton killings, they all deserted him in his hour of greatest need.

Meanwhile the American army had grown to such proportions that it was able to detach General Lincoln with 1,500 Connecticut and New Hampshire militia to raid Burgoyne's extremely thin line of communica- tions which had been rerouted up Lake George and along the military road through Warren County. On August 8 , the British general countered by sending three battalions of Hessians under their commander, Baron Rie- desel, to John's Farm near Halfway Brook, and moving the base of reserve supplies from Fort George to the more defensible Diamond Island, seven miles down Lake George. Defenses were erected, artillery posted, and a guard of two companies of the British 47th under Captain Aubrey took post there.

These precautions availed little. Fort Edward and Skenesborough were recaptured. Colonel John Brown's attempt to take Ticonderoga was re- pulsed, but he seized the outworks, released many prisoners, and captured a number of boats. Then, turning the vessels about, he attacked Diamond Island. Failing to dislodge the defenders, Brown beached and burned the boats and made good his retreat.

The end rapidly approached for Burgoyne. Hemmed in front and rear, his supplies and communications cut off, and the Battle of Saratoga lost, he laid down his arms on October 17, 1777. Rejoicing, many Warren

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87

County pioneers returned to rebuild their shattered settlements. On May 5, 1778, the annual meeting of the Town of Queensbury was held as usual.

Indeed the British defeat at Saratoga spelled the end of major campaign- ing in the north for three years. The frontier might have been at peace except for the partisan strife between hot-headed Patriots and Tories. This local conflict kept the region in even greater ferment than the incur- sions from Canada of guerrilla bands of British, Tories, and Indians.

During most of 1777, while Burgoyne's might rolled across the land, Tories had the upper hand, but the next spring Americans once again came into power and some among them determined to drive the Loyalists from the country. Folk like Wing and his peaceful Quakers of Queens- bury were perfectly willing to live in harmony with their neighbors and give to every man, Whig or Tory, a right to his own political opinion, but in the year 1778, neither the embittered Whigs nor the far from subdued Tories were in a tolerant frame of mind. As early as December 1777, John Younglove, Commissioner of Sequestrations for the Northern Depart- ment, wrote to the Committee of Safety: "There is likewise another set of men that took protection and then went home to their work; we want to know what to do with them, and concerning their estates. There is likewise a set of them that has been with Burgoyne through the campaign; and just before the capitulation, ran from him and came home, and now are devouring the provisions that the friends suffer for; and the populace is determined to drive them off or kill them. If something is not speedily done with them, we fear the consequence, if they are left amongst us."

What happened in some instances is disclosed by the correspondence of General John Stark, at this time commander of the northern armies. On May 21, 1778, he wrote to Colonel Safford, commandant at Fort Edward, whose militia apparently were taking sides with the Patriot hot-heads: "Doctor Smith complains that the troops at Fort Edward are turning out the inhabitants and destroying the buildings at that place. I should be glad that such disorders should be surpressed, and the inhabitants' prop- erty secured."

The following month General Stark wrote in the same vein to the President of the New Hampshire Congress: "They [the people] do very well in the hanging way. They hanged nine on the 1 6th of May, on the 5th of June nine; and have one hundred and twenty in jail, of which, I believe, more than one-half will go the same way. Murder and robberies are committed every day in this neighborhood. So you may judge of my situation, with the enemy on my front, and the devil in my rear."

At this time occurred another of those incredible Tory journeys across Warren County's western wilderness, an exploit so bold and remarkable that it met no effective resistance by the Whigs of Tryon County. A

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band, more than 100 strong, composed of Loyalists, who, in 1776, had escaped with Sir John Johnson by this route from Johnstown to Canada, now returned for their families. Allowed to complete their arrangements and depart unmolested, they boldly attacked Patriot homesteads and took prisoners on their long northward march via the Hudson, overland to Lake George, and down Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence.

Almost simultaneously another party of Tories, one of whom was Gil- bert Harris, raided the isolated homes east of Queensbury near the shores of Lake George and captured Moses Harris, brother of Gilbert and father of the spy who had tricked his Uncle Gil during the Burgoyne campaign. Gilbert now insisted that his brother be taken a prisoner to Canada.

"He is an old man, and if he goes, the fatigue and exposure will kill him," remonstrated Andrew Rakely, leader of the Tories.

"Let him die then," responded the embittered Gil. But Rakely had his way and Moses was released on his promise under oath to say nothing of brother Gilbert's doings to his Whig neighbors.

The spring of 1779 opened ominously for the frontier when, in March, Skenesborough was plundered and burned, and its settlers were carried off to Canada by a raiding party of 130 Indians led by the rabid Tory, Joe Bettys. For a time following this event Fort Anne became the most northerly military outpost. The rest of the season must have remained relatively quiet, however, for the 1779 Queensbury Town Meeting was held as usual. Indeed enough interest was generated to elect for the first time in town history a supervisor to replace patriarch Abraham Wing. The office, nevertheless, remained in the family; for the new supervisor was Phineas Babcock, Wing's son-in-law.

In the opening months of 1780 alarms and rumors of invasion disturbed the frontier. Even the Quakers of Warren County moved behind the protection of Fort Edward; the town meeting in May being adjourned from Queensbury to the mansion of Judge William Duer at Fort Miller. At the same time Quartermaster Generals Morgan Lewis and Christopher Yates again dispatched foraging parties throughout the border to seize wheat, cattle, and other supplies for the destitute garrisons at Fort George, Fort Edward, and Fort Anne. By this time the Warren County pioneers, says Holden, "had little to carry or lose."

The rumors of invasion were no false alarms. A detachment of John- son's Greens and two hundred Tories and Indians, in all 500 men under Sir John Johnson, pursued their way in secret to Johnstown and accom- plished their purpose of recovering family plate from the cellar of the old Johnson mansion. Murdering, scalping and burning in the most ruthless fashion, this expedition was one of the worst outrages of the war. Pur-

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sued by hastily gathered American militia, Sir John retreated by way of the Sacandaga River and thence along the Indian trail around the base of Crane Mountain in the present town of Johnsburg to Crown Point on Lake Champlain, where his boats had been hidden. Governor George Clinton and the militia pursued, taking the route through Lakes George and Champlain, but the marauders escaped.

In June or July General Sir Frederick Haldimand, newly appointed Governor of Canada, and a force of 10,000 men had reoccupied Ticon- deroga, abandoned by the British under the terms of Burgoyne's surrender. Haldimand stirred up further border strife by using the land controversy over the Hampshire Grants in an intrigue to secure the return of the Green Mountain territory to British allegiance. He also allowed bands of Indians and Tories to make Ticonderoga their base for raids against the border settlements.

Travel on the military road through Warren County became unsafe. Colonel Seth Warner, returning to Fort Edward on horseback after an inspection of the portion of his regiment under Captain John Chipman stationed at Fort George, was ambushed near Bloody Pond by a party of these raiders. Two companion officers were instantly killed; Warner was wounded and his mount shot under him. Only by grasping the bridle of another horse and galloping away was the intrepid colonel able to escape capture or death. A few days later two young men, John High and Albert Baker of Sandy Hill, while taking some horses to the officers at Fort George, arrived at Halfway Brook to find the still warm bodies of four settlers who, while working there, had been murdered and scalped.

Almost without interruption these bloody forays continued all summer, forerunners of the attack in force which came in the fall. On the first day of October Major Christopher Carleton of the 29th British regiment with a detachment of 800 Regulars, a company of German levies, 200 Tories and 175 Indians, lightly equipped for swift attacks and rapid marches, embarked in 34 vessels at St. John's for the trip up the Richelieu River and Lake Champlain. His Loyalist battalion was commanded by Colonel Ebenezer Jessup of Warren County and contained Tories from every border neighborhood, who would act as guides and make certain that not even the most isolated farmhouse should escape the wave of destruction.

At Bulwagga Bay near Crown Point 400 Regulars, Tories, and Indians under Colonel John Munro, a Loyalist of Schenectady, were disembarked. Crossing a great stretch of Warren County wilderness by way of the old Indian trail through Johnsburg and around Crane Mountain to the Sacandaga, Munro laid waste the countryside, plundered Ballstown, now Ballston Spa, put the tiny settlement to the torch, and hastily re-

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treated northward. Meanwhile Carleton with the main force continued to the head of Lake Champlain, and, on October 8, landed at South Bay. He sent a few boats back to Ticonderoga, to be portaged into Lake George for carrying troops and supplies direct to Fort George, which he planned to attack three days later.

Marching rapidly southward he soon reached Fort Anne. Here a blockhouse of rough logs, surrounded by a stockaded inclosure, housed an untrained garrison of 75 militiamen from the neighborhood under Captain Adiel Sherwood of Sandy Hill. To make matters worse many of the defenders, including some from Warren County, had their wives and children with them. Scouts warned Sherwood of the approach of the enemy but there was little he could do except hurry a dispatch rider to notify Colonel Henry Livingston, commandant at Fort Edward, who failed to relay the message to Fort George.

On October 10, Carleton surrounded Fort Anne and demanded its surrender. When Sherwood refused, the British paraded before the garri- son in force, shot away part of the stockade with cannon fire, and set the barracks ablaze with hot shot. The American commander asked a parley. Assured that the women and children would be allowed to depart in safety he capitulated. His men were made prisoners and the fort burned.

Despite the obvious necessity for his surrender Sherwood, like Schuyler and St. Clair during Burgoyne's invasion, was denounced in official papers, and fireside gossip. It was even asserted that he was bribed during his parley with Carleton. Officialdom, even including General Washington, seems to have had little knowledge or appreciation of the conditions.

Carleton now split his force into two parts. The smaller one, made up mostly of Tories and Indians, ranged southward as far as Old Saratoga, slaughtering settlers who had not fled, burning houses and barns. A line of fires along the horizon guided the fugitives as they sought to escape the raiders.

Fort Edward was not attacked, and for this Colonel Livingston claimed great credit. Although he had but 70 men he sent a note addressed to Sherwood by a known Loyalist promising to come to the relief of Fort Anne with a large force. As he anticipated, the message fell into the hands of the enemy and, according to Livingston, averted an attack on his position. Indeed it is more than likely that Carleton had no intention of being delayed by an attack on any post that might offer resistance. His principal purpose was to devastate swiftly as much of the country as possible.

From Fort Anne, Carleton quickly led the balance of his force west- ward over the road across Warren County to French Mountain and the

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Military Road to Lake George. On the morning of October 1 1, his Indian scouts were observed near Bloody Pond by a messenger who had been dis- patched from Fort George to Fort Edward with a request for supplies.

An hour or two later the entire British force was attacked in the rear by a party of 48 men under Captain Thomas Sill, three-quarters of the garrison, sent out from Fort George by Captain Chipman to drive off what they supposed to be a marauding band of Indians, so that the mes- senger could get through. Sill had orders to follow the main road, but instead he took a route through the woods that allowed Carleton to get between him and the fort.

This attack on Carleton's rearguard was gallant but foolhardy. The men fought bravely but were quickly surrounded, and all except 14, who became detached in the melee, were killed or captured. With only fifteen soldiers left in the fort and but one cannon, Chipman stoutly resisted. Finally, almost out of ammunition, he surrendered under an offer of the following terms:

Article 1st. The troops of the garrison to surrender themselves

prisoners of war. Article 2d. That the women and children be permitted to return

to their homes, with two wagons and their baggage. Article 3 d. Each officer shall be allowed their servants. Article 4th. No Indian to enter the fort until a British detachment

takes possession of the fort. Article 5th. Major Carleton passes his honor that no levies in the

fort shall be lost, nor any person be molested. Article 6th. Each soldier to carry his knapsack. Article 7th. Ensign Barrett shall be permitted to return home with his family and the regimental books, on giving his parole to Major Carleton.

While Carleton occupied himself with Fort George, flying parties of his Indians and Tories swept through Queensbury and northern Kings- bury capturing 18 of the inhabitants and applying the torch to every home, outbuilding, and mill in their path. A contemporary described it thus: "I beheld nothing about me but the remains of conflagrations; a few bricks, proof against the fire, were the only indication of ruined houses; whilst the fences still entire, and cleared out lands, announced these deplorable habitations had once been the abode of riches and happi- ness." The Warren County settlements, which had stoutly held out for five "long years, were now entirely abandoned. There are no records of any town meetings in 1781 or 1782.

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Carleton, having burned Fort George and completed his mission of destruction elsewhere, embarked on Lake George and retired toward Ticonderoga. His expedition had killed twenty-seven " rebels," wounded two, and captured 118. Widespread havoc had been wrought, and the British had lost but three killed and four wounded. All this had little military significance except as a part of a larger plan that contemplated another invasion of the Hudson Valley. Washington reported to Congress: "It is thought, and perhaps not without foundation, that this incursion was made upon a supposition that Arnold's treachery had succeeded."

Although there were boats for Carleton and his prisoners of war, the captives of the Loyalists and red men were forced to trudge down the west shore of Lake George. In this party were James Higson, who had pre- viously been made prisoner in 1777 and released, Eben Fuller and his son Benjamin, Andrew Lewis, another son-in-law of Abraham Wing, old Moses Harris and his son, William. The Tories just missed capturing young Moses Harris, the American spy, who would have been considered the greatest prize of all.

Somewhere along Carleton's red trail he had been joined by that bitter foe of the Whigs, Gilbert Harris. Gil may have been responsible for the hard treatment now visited on old Moses, his brother. This aged patriot was forced to remove his shoes and stockings and shoulder a huge pack. His bloody footprints marked the weary miles through the wilderness. William, a hardy, muscular woodsman and scout, would gladly have shouldered his father's burdens but his plea for permission to do so fell on deaf ears. Arriving finally at Bulwagga Bay, the prisoners were embarked on bateaux for the trip to Quebec.

On their arrival they were ransomed from the Indians and became prisoners of war. Higson was freed almost at once through the influence of his Tory brother-in-law and good friend, Daniel Jones. The elder Harris and three others were sent to Halifax and later exchanged, Harris eventually returning to his home in Dutchess County. William Harris and the remaining 13 were confined on an island in the St. Lawrence, and put to work under a guard of soldiers. Their provisions were brought from the mainland by boat.

On this procedure hinged a plan to escape, formulated in the spring of 1781 by William Harris and thirteen other prisoners. For several days they hid small amounts of food. Then seven bold spirits, including Har- ris, all that would leave when the crucial moment arrived, seized the boat and made their way to the south shore of the river. Before them stretched the vast, wilderness of northern New England. With Harris leading the way they struck off southward.

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93

In a few days their food gave out and starvation, fatigue, and black flies dogged their footsteps. Finally, over Harris' protests, his companions built a fire in a swampy hollow and smothered it with damp wood to drive off the scourging insects. Around this the party camped. All soon fell into a deep sleep of exhaustion, unmindful of the pillar of smoke that floated like a banner above the trees.

About midnight they awoke to the sound of rifle fire. Three of the party were squirming wounded on the ground. As Harris came to his feet, he saw a tomahawk in the hand of a tall Indian raised above the head of one of his companions. Swiftly the powerful scout grappled with the red man, threw him into the fire, and forced his head into the flames. At this moment Cyrenus Parks, a Tory and former neighbor of Harris, raised a clubbed rifle over Harris and ordered him to release the squirm- ing Indian.

" You won't kill an unarmed man will you, Parks, and an old neighbor, too?" parleyed Harris.

The only reply was a blow that broke the scout's upraised arm, and, crashing on his skull, laid his scalp open down to the ear.

Several hours later when he groaned into semi-consciousness he had another gash on his head made by a tomahawk, two lacerations on the forehead made by the butt of a gun and a bayonet wound in the chest. Evidently he had been left for dead. His companions were gone, his knap- sack, coat, and shoes as well. Hardly conscious, Harris slung his broken arm through a neckerchief and staggered away.

Living on roots and herbs and an occasional frog, caught with his good hand and eaten raw, he at length stumbled out of the woods to the bank of a swift stream that barred further progress. Looking about for mate- rials to construct a raft, he finally became aware of two men who had been watching him from upstream. Too tired, hungry, and weak from pain and loss of blood to resist further, Harris waved for help although he feared they were enemies. They turned out to be two of his fugitive comrades who washed his horrible wounds, by this time crawling with maggots, and contrived bark splints for his broken arm.

Next morning the three men crossed the stream on an improvised raft, and several days later reached a log cabin in a clearing. One of the trio cautiously approached the house and begged for something to eat from the French woman whose men folk were not at home. She refused but the desperate fugitive found and took a loaf of corn bread. He then re- turned to his companions with welcome food but the unwelcome news that they were still in Canada.

94 WARREN COUNTY GUIDE

With what speed their weary bodies could muster they again turned southward. Finally the gaunt fugitives reached the Connecticut River at a point in southern Vermont. At the home of a relative in Salem, several months were required to heal Harris' wounds, but after he recovered he served in the border militia until the close of the war.

After these grim experiences it is not strange that Harris carried to his grave a deep and unreasoning hatred of all Tories and Indians. These found no welcome in Harris Hollow, Harrisena, where Old Bill became a noted local character. On one occasion he is said to have shot an Indian peddler merely because the red man made threatening gestures at the Harris children who were taunting him. A sequel to this story is that he also killed a brave sent by the tribe to avenge the murder, braining the Indian with a hoe when the warrior made the mistake of asking Old Bill to direct him to the Harris home.

Cyrenus Parks, the Loyalist who had wielded the gun butt against Bill's head during his flight from Canada, had a Patriot brother, Joseph, who came to occupy the Parks home near the Harris homestead. After the Revolution he visited Bill Harris and in a roundabout way suggested that the scout forgive and forget his grudge against Cyrenus. Bill told Joseph with considerable heat that he would shoot Cyrenus on sight. Joseph pressed the point until Bill savagely shouted:

"Joseph, Cyrenus is at your house, and if he wants to live he had better keep out of my way." Cyrenus did.

With Carleton's retirement down Lake George major warlike activity ended in Warren County. General John Stark appointed by Washington to resume command of the Northern Department in June 1781, did his best to preserve order with untrained and poorly armed militia, but war parties, some of them outlaw bands, roamed the countryside plundering such settlements as still survived and effectively discouraging any at- tempts to resettle the abandoned homesteads.

A contributing factor to the widespread insecurity was British- occupied Ticonderoga, used as a base with the tacit consent of General Haldimand for raiding parties sent out to harass the frontier, while the general carried on his intrigue with the Hampshire Grants. General Schuyler, placed in charge of intelligence after being acquitted of an absurd charge of neglect of duty during the Burgoyne campaign, again pressed into service the spy Moses Harris, and his colleague Fish. They were to attempt to intercept some of the correspondence between Haldi- mand and the leaders of the Grants.

Soon these secret agents reported a conference with the Tory, Andrew Rakely, and others which purported to reveal that the Americans of the

History

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f»0inf ir>a bv J. L. fi. Ft rris

BATTLE ON SNOWSHOES, 1758

Courtesy Glens Falls Insurance Co.

DEATH OF COLONEL EPHRAIM WILLIAMS, 1755

Paint inu by P. ('. Ynftm Courtesy Glens Falls Insurance Co.

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MONTCALM ENDEAVORS TO RESTRAIN HIS INDIAN ALLIES, 1757

Painting by J. L. G. Ferris Courtesy Glens Falls Insurance Co.

COLONISTS MAN GUNS AT BATTLE OF LAKE GEORGE, B0OC Painting by F. C. Yohm Courtesy Glens Falls Insurance Co.

ABERCROMBY SURVEYS HIS WAR FLOTILLA ON LAKE GEORGE, 1758

Painting by F. C. Yohm Courtesy Glens Falls Insurance Co.

GENERAL WASHINGTON AT THE TIME OF HIS VISIT TO WARREN COUNTY IN 1783

Painting by J. L. G. Ferris Courtesy Glens Falls Insurance Co.

ROGERS SLIDE, SCENE OF CAPT. ROBERT ROGERS' ESCAPE FROM INDIANS, 1758

RESCUE OF MAJOR ISRAEL PUTNAM NEAR GLENS FALLS, 1758

Painting by J. L. G. Ferris Courtesy Glens Falls Insurance C

WARREN COUNTY GUIDE 97

Hampshire Grants "were to lay down their arms, and the British were to advance to the south end of Lake George and erect fortifications with a view to the command and occupation of the contiguous country." But nothing happened. This with similar false messages demonstrated that the spies misinterpreted the astute politicians of the Green Mountains who were simply playing politics in an endeavor to secure a favorable settle- ment of their land f ued with New York, and " managed for two years to play fast and loose with the Canadian authorities and the Continental Congress, being loyal and true to neither."

In the fall of 178 1 another foray was made through the western section of Warren County on the settlements about Johnstown. But this time the invaders, led by Major Ross and that active Loyalist, Walter Butler, came to grief. In the last battle of the war, fought on October 25, a few days after the surrender of Lord Cornwallis, the New York and New England militia under Colonel Marinus Willett defeated the raiders, who suffered heavy losses. Their retreat became a rout. Intercepted at Jerseyfield by local militia from the Mohawk Valley, which "waiter Butler had repeat- edly ravaged, he was slain with many of his men. No prisoners were taken, but it is doubtful whether more than a very few of the fugitives reached Canada. They had abandoned their baggage and probably most of them had not even a blanket, a gun, or more than a day's rations. Snow lay on the ground and fifty miles of the mountain fastness of Warren County lay between them and Ticonderoga, the nearest British base.

Through all of 1782 rumors of invasion from Canada were frequent and as often proved false. Much of this false information emanated from Ticonderoga as a part of the British scheme to secure the loyalty of the Hampshire Grants on one side and occupy the attention of the New York border troops on the other. But all the conspiring, all the unrest and uncertainty came at last to an end when, in April 1783, Washington pro- claimed a cessation of hostilities. Pioneers began at once to reestablish their settlements. Less than a month later the annual town meeting was held as usual in Queensbury.

After the war Moses Harris, whose espionage work had been so effective, received a pension, purchased land in Queensbury near Lake George, and developed the section called Harrisena. There he lived until his death on November 13, 1838, at the age of 89. Some of his descendants still reside in Warren County. A grandson erected a monument to Moses in the little country burial ground of the Harrisena Episcopal Church. The stone bears this epitaph:

He was a man that was true to his friends and his country. He was the man that carried the package for Gen. Schuyler and from Gen. Schuyler to Gen. Washington. It went, and without doubt was the

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instrument that put Gen. Burgoyne's journey to an end. He it was that bought the Patten granted to John Lawrence and others when wild; and settled the same, being two thousand acres, to the benefit of his children and grandchildren. For which I think I ought to do something to his memory. J. J. H., Grandson

Growth and Government

K)YAL patents or Colonial land grants were early used to bring settlers to the virgin wilderness. In essense the plan was sound but in practice it fell into much abuse. The grants caused trouble with the Indians who feared confiscation of their lands; they were a prolific source of court squabbles over land titles; and only too often they went to influential favorites and land speculators who never intended to become settlers. Eventually cheap land did bring pioneers, but none of their settlements in "warren County became permanent until after the Revo- lution.

On September 3, 1696, the Reverend Godfrey Dellius, Dutch minister at Albany, used his influence to obtain from Acting Governor Fletcher a patent to territory "lying upon the east side of the Hudson River, be- tween the northernmost bounds of Saratoga and the Rock Rossian [Split Rock on Lake Champlain], containing about 70 miles in length and 12 miles broad, subject to a yearly rent to the crown of one hundred raccoon skins." This grant included a large part of present-day Warren County. Because Dellius' deeds to the land were declared fraudulent, the patent was vacated at the instance of Lord Bellamont on March 21, 1699.

"For the illegal and surreptitious obtaining of said grants" Dellius was removed from his ministry, and was succeeded in 1700 by the Reverend John Lydius. In 1732 the latter followed the course of his predecessor, securing from Governor Shirley of Massachusetts a confirmation of his alleged Indian deeds to land bordering on the southern shores of Lake Champlain and Lake George and extending to the Hudson. Thus it em- braced some territory now a part of Warren County. No settlement resulted here, however, and the grant seems to have lapsed in 1791 with the death of John Henry Lydius, son of the original patentee.

The great Kayaderosseras Patent, issued by the Crown in 1708 to thirteen grantees, was based on deeds supposed to have been given to the influential Robert Livingston and David Schuyler by the Mohawk Sachems, Joseph and Hendrick. It contained 800,000 acres, lying be- tween the Mohawk and the Hudson and on it are based many of the land titles in the Town of Luzerne and some in the southwestern part of Queensbury. Because of a claim that the grant encompassed more land than the original agreement, it was the cause of resentment among the Indians and consequent anxiety to the settlers for sixty years. For over a hundred and fifty years its indefinite boundaries and inadequate surveys brought about numerous law suits. Perhaps it is significant that the name Kayaderosseras is derived from an Indian word meaning crooked stream.

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As late as 1857 Thomas B. Bennett sued Abraham Wing III of Glens Falls in a land claim case based on the Kayaderosseras Patent. Wing founded his defense on the same land grant, whereas the plaintiff expected him to claim under the Queensbury Patent, and Bennett was defeated. Another fact established by a lawsuit stemming from the Kayaderosseras Patent was that Baker's Falls, at the present village of Hudson Falls, was the third fall in the Hudson River, rather than the falls at Fort Miller.

The winding course of the Hudson from the western boundary of Queensbury down to Hudson Falls left a gore of over two thousand acres between the north boundary of the Kayaderosseras Patent and the south- ern bank of the river, east of the present South Glens Falls. This tract about 1770 became the Glen Patent. Although it was across the Hudson from Warren County, the patentee's name is perpetuated in Glens Falls.

The patent most important to the settlement of the County was issued on May 20, 1762. It granted 23,000 acres lying on the Hudson River west of Kingsbury to Daniel Prindle and others, twenty-three grantees in all. Just four weeks later, June 18, a proprietor's meeting showed that the ownership of the Queensbury