Canada: the Empire of the North Part 19

It was what the despised colonials feared and any bushranger could have predicted. July 9, in stifling heat, the marchers had come to a loop in the Monongahela River. Braddock thought to avoid the loop by fording twice. He was now within eight miles of Fort Duquesne--the modern Pittsburg. Though Indian raiders had scalped some wanderers from the trail and insolent messages had been occasionally found scrawled in French on birch trees, not a Frenchman had been seen on the march. The advance guard had crossed the second ford about midday when the road makers at a little opening beyond the river saw a white man clothed in buckskin, but wearing an officer's badge, dash out of the woods to the fore, wave his hat, . . . and disappear. A moment later the well-known war whoop of the French bushrovers tore the air to tatters; and bullets rained from ambushed foes in a sheet of fire. In vain the English drums rolled . . . and rolled . . . and soldiers shouted, "The King! G.o.d save the King!" One officer tried to rally his men to rush the woods, but they were shot down by a torrent of bullets from an unseen foe. The Virginian bushfighters alone knew how to meet such an emergency. Jumping from tree to tree for shelter like Indians dancing sideways to avoid the enemy's aim, they had broken from rank to fight in bushman fas.h.i.+on when Braddock {229} came galloping furiously from the rear and ordered them back in line. What use was military rank with an invisible foe? As well shoot air as an unseen Indian! Again the Virginians broke rank, and the regulars, huddled together like cattle in the shambles, fired blindly and succeeded only in hitting their own provincial troops. Braddock stormed and swore and rode like a fury incarnate, roaring orders which no one could hear, much less obey. Five horses were shot under him and the dauntless commander had mounted a fresh one when the big guns came plunging forward; but the artillery on which Braddock had pinned his faith only plowed pits in the forest mold. Of eighty officers, sixty had fallen and a like proportion of men. Braddock ordered a retreat. The march became a panic, the panic frenzied terror, the men who had stood so stolidly under withering fire now das.h.i.+ng in headlong flight from the second to the first ford and back over the trail, breathless as if pursued by demons! Artillery, cattle, supplies, dispatch boxes,--all were abandoned. Was.h.i.+ngton's clothes had been riddled by bullets, but he had escaped injury. Braddock reeled from his horse mortally wounded, to be carried {230} back on a litter to that scene of Was.h.i.+ngton's surrender the year before. Four days later the English general died there. Of the English troops, more than a thousand lay dead, blistering in the July sun, maimed and scalped by the Indians.

Braddock was buried in his soldier's coat beside the trail, all signs of the grave effaced to prevent vandalism.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLAN OF FORT BEAUSeJOUR]

Of all the losses the most serious were the dispatch boxes; for they contained the English plans of campaign from Acadia to Niagara, and were carried back to Fort Duquesne, where they put the French on guard.

The jubilant joy at the French fort need not be described. When he heard of the English advance, Contrecoeur, the commander, had been cooped up with less than one thousand men, half of whom were Indians.

Had Braddock once reached Fort Duquesne, he could have starved it into surrender without firing a gun, or sh.e.l.led it into kindling wood with his heavy artillery. Beaujeu, an officer under Contrecoeur, had volunteered to go out and meet the English. "My son, my son, will you walk into the arms of death?" demanded the Indian chiefs. "My fathers, will you allow me to go alone?" answered Beaujeu; and out he sallied with six hundred picked men. It was Beaujeu whom Braddock's men had seen dash out and wave his hat. The brave Frenchman fell, shot at the first {231} volley from the English, and his Indian friends avenged his death by roasting thirty English prisoners alive.

The Isthmus of Chignecto, or the boundary between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, was the scene of the border-land fights in Acadia. To narrate half the forays, raids, and ambuscades would require a volume.

Fights as gallant as Dollard's at the Sault waged from Beausejour, the French fort north of the boundary, to Grand Pre and Annapolis, where the English were stationed. After the founding of Halifax the Abbe Le Loutre, whose false, foolish counsels had so often endangered the habitant farmer, moved from his mission in the center of Acadia up to Beausejour on the New Brunswick side. Here he could be seen with his Indians toiling like a demon over the trenches, when Monckton, the English general, came on June 1, 1855, with the British fleet, to land his forces at Fort Lawrence, the English post on the south side.

Colonel Lawrence was now English governor of Acadia, and he had decided with Monckton that once and for all the French of Acadia must be subjugated. The French of Beausejour had in all less than fifteen hundred men, half of whom were simple Acadian farmers forced into unwilling service by the priest's threats of Indian raid in this world and d.a.m.nation in the next. Day dawn of June 4 the bugles blew to arms and the English forces, some four thousand, had marched to the south sh.o.r.e of the Missaguash River, when the French on the north side uttered a whoop and emitted a clatter of shots. Black-hatted, sinister, tireless, the priest could be seen urging his Indians on.

The English brought up three field cannon and under protection of their scattering fire laid a pontoon bridge. Crossing the river, they marched within a mile of the fort. That night the sky was alight with flame; for Vergor, the French commander, and Abbe Le Loutre set fire to all houses outside the fort walls. In a few days the English cannon had been placed in a circle round the fort, and set such strange music humming in the ears of the besieged that the Acadian farmers deserted and the priest nervously thought of flight. Louisburg {232} could send no aid, and still the bombs kept bursting through the roofs of the fort houses. One morning a bomb crashed through the roof of the breakfast room, killing six officers on the spot; and the French at once hung out the white flag; but when the English troops marched in on June 16, at seven in the evening, Le Loutre had fled overland through the forests of New Brunswick for Quebec.

There scant welcome awaited the renegade priest. The French governors had been willing to use him as their tool at a price ($800 a year), but when the tool failed of its purpose they cast him aside. Le Loutre sailed for France, but his s.h.i.+p was captured by an English cruiser and he was imprisoned for eight years on the island of Jersey.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GENERAL MONCKTON]

Meanwhile, how was fate dealing with the Acadian farmers? Ever since the Treaty of Utrecht they had been afraid to take the oath of unqualified loyalty to England, lest New France, or rather Abbe Le Loutre, let loose the hounds of Indian ma.s.sacre on their peaceful settlements. Besides, had not the priest a.s.sured them year in and year out that France would recover Acadia and put to the sword those habitants who had forsworn France? And they had been equally afraid to side with the French, for in case of failure the burden of punishment would fall on them alone. For almost half a century they had been known as _Neutrals_. Of their population of 12,000, 3000 had been lured away to Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton. When Cornwallis had founded Halifax he had intended to wait only till the English were firmly established, when he would demand an oath of unqualified allegiance from {233} the Acadians. They, on their part, were willing to take the oath with one proviso,--that they should never be required to take up arms against the French; or they would have been willing to leave Acadia, as the Treaty of Utrecht had provided, in case they did not take the oath of allegiance. But in the early days of English possession the English governors were not willing they should leave.

If the Acadians had migrated, it would simply have strengthened the French in Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick.

Obstructions had been created that prevented the supply of transports to move the Acadians. The years had drifted on, and a new generation had grown up, knowing nothing of treaty rights, but only that the French were threatening them on one side if they did not rise against England, and the English on the other side if they did not take oath of unqualified allegiance. Cornwallis had long since left Halifax, and Lawrence, the English governor, while loyal to a fault, was, like Braddock, that type of English understrapper who has wrought such irreparable injury to English prestige purely from lack of sympathetic insight with colonial conditions. For years before he had become governor, Lawrence's days had been embittered by the intrigues of the French with the Acadian farmers. He had been in Halifax when the Abbe Le Loutre's Indian brigands had raided and slain as many as thirty workmen at a time near the English fort. He had been at the Isthmus of Chignecto that fatal morning when some Indians dressed in the suits of French officers waved a white flag and lured Captain Howe of the English fort across stream, where they shot him under flag of truce in cold blood.

These are not excuses for what Lawrence did. Nothing can excuse the infamy of his policy toward the Acadians. There are few blacker crimes in the history of the world; but these facts explain how a man of Lawrence's standing could a.s.sume the responsibility he did. In addition, Lawrence was a bigoted Protestant. He not only hated the Acadians because they were French; he hated them as "a colony of rattlesnakes" because they were Catholics; and being an Englishman, he despised them {234} because they were colonials. France and England were now on the verge of the great struggle for supremacy in America.

Eighteen French frigates had come to Louisburg and three thousand French regulars to Quebec. If Lawrence did not yet know that Braddock had been defeated on July 9 at Duquesne,--as his friends declare in his defense,--it is a strange thing; for by August the b.l.o.o.d.y slaughter of the Monongahela was known everywhere else in America from Quebec to New Spain. With Lawrence and Monckton and Murray and Boscawen and the other English generals sent to conduct the campaign in Acadia, the question was what to do with the French habitants. Let two facts be distinctly stated here and with great emphasis: first, the colonial officers, like Winslow from Ma.s.sachusetts, knew absolutely nothing of the English officers' plans; they were not admitted to the conferences of the English officers and were simply expected to obey orders; second, the English government knew absolutely nothing of the English officers' course till it was too late for remedy. In fact, later dispatches of that year inquire sharply what Lawrence meant by an obscure threat to drive the Acadians out of the country.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GENERAL JOHN WINSLOW]

Did a darker and more sinister motive underlie the policy of Lawrence and his friends? Poems, novels, histories have waged war of words over this. Only the facts can be stated. Land to the extent of twenty thousand acres each, which had belonged to {235} the Acadians, was ultimately deeded to Lawrence and his friends. Charges of corruption against Lawrence himself were lodged with the British government both by mail and by personal delegates from Halifax. Unfortunately Lawrence died in Halifax in 1760 before the investigation could take place; and whether true or false, the odium of the charges rests upon his fame.

What he did with the Acadians is too well known to require telling. In secret conclave the infamous edict was p.r.o.nounced. Quickly messengers were sent with secret dispatches to the officers of land forces and s.h.i.+ps at Annapolis, at Mines, at Chignecto, to repair to the towns of the Acadians, where, upon opening their dispatches, they would find their orders, which were to be kept a secret among the officers. The colonial officers, on reading the orders, were simply astounded. "It is the most grievous affair that ever I was in, in my life," declared Winslow. The edict was that every man, woman, and child of the Acadians should be forcibly deported, in Lawrence's words, "in such a way as to prevent the reunion of the colonists." The men of the Acadian settlements were summoned to the churches to hear the will of the King of England. Once inside, doors were locked, English soldiers placed on guard with leveled bayonet, and the edict read by an officer standing on the pulpit stairs or on a table. The Acadians were snared like rats in a trap. Outside were their families, hostages for the peaceable conduct of the men. Inside were the brothers and husbands, hostages for the good conduct of the families outside. Only in a few places was there any rioting, and this was probably caused by the brutality of the officers. Murray and Monckton and Lawrence refer to their prisoners as "Popish recusants," "poor wretches," "rascals who have been bad subjects." While the Acadians were to be deported so they could never reunite as a colony, it was intended to keep the families together and allow them to take on board what money and household goods they possessed; but there were interminable delays for transports and supplies. From September to December the deportation dragged on, and when the Acadians, patient as sheep at the shambles, became restless, some of the s.h.i.+ps were sent off {236} with the men, while the families were still on land. In places the men were allowed ash.o.r.e to harvest their crops and care for their stock; but harvest and stock fell to the victors as burning hayricks and barns nightly lighted to flame the wooded background and placid seas of the fair Acadian land. Before winter set in, the Acadians had been scattered from New England to Louisiana. A few people in the Chignecto region had escaped to the woods of New Brunswick, and one s.h.i.+pload overpowered its officers and fled to St. John River; but in all, six thousand six hundred people were deported.

It is the blackest crime that ever took place under the British flag, and the expulsion was only the beginning of the sufferers' woes. Some people found their way to Quebec, but Quebec was dest.i.tute and in the throes of war. The wanderers came to actual starvation. The others wandered homeless in Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, in Louisiana. After the peace of 1763 some eight hundred gathered together in Boston and began the long march overland through the forests of Maine and New Brunswick, to return to Acadia. Singing hymns, dragging their baggage on sleighs, pausing to hunt by the way, these sad pilgrims toiled more than one thousand miles through forest and swamp, and at the end of two years found themselves back in Acadia.

But they were like ghosts of the dead revisiting scenes of childhood!

Their lands were occupied by new owners. Of their herds naught remained but the bleaching bone heaps where the lowing cattle had huddled in winter storms. New faces filled their old houses. Strange children rambled beneath the little dormer windows of the Acadian cottages, and the voices of the boys at play in the apple orchards shouted in an alien tongue. The very names of the places had vanished.

Beausejour was now c.u.mberland. Beauba.s.sin had become Amherst.

Cobequid was now Truro. Grand Pre was now known as Horton. The heart-broken people hurried on like ghosts to the unoccupied lands of St. Mary's Bay,--St. Mary's Bay, where long ago Priest Aubry had been lost. Here they settled, to hew out for themselves a second home in the wilderness.

{237} It will be recalled that Braddock's plans had been captured by the French, and those plans told Baron Dieskau, who had come out to command the French troops, that the English under William Johnson, a great leader of the Iroquois, inured to bush life like an Indian, were to attack the French fort at Crown Point on Lake Champlain. Now observe: on the Ohio, Braddock the regular had been defeated; in Acadia, Lawrence and Monckton and Murray, the English generals, had brought infamy across England's renown by their failure to understand colonial conditions. At Lake Champlain the conditions are reversed.

Johnson, the English leader, is, from long residence in America, almost a colonial. Dieskau, the commander of the French, is a veteran of Saxon wars, but knows nothing of bushfighting. What happens?

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAP OF ACADIA AND THE ADJACENT ISLANDS, 1755]

Dieskau had intended to attack the English at Oswego, but the plans for Johnson on Lake Champlain brought the commander of the French rus.h.i.+ng up the Richelieu River with three thousand soldiers, part regulars, part Canadians. Crown Point--called Fort Frederick by the French--was reached in August. No English are here, but scouts bring word that Johnson has built a fort on the south end of Lake George, and, leaving only five hundred men to garrison it, is moving up the lake with his main troops.

{238}

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON]

Fired by the French victories over Braddock, Dieskau planned to capture the English fort and ambush Johnson on the march. Look at the map!

The south end of Lake Champlain lies parallel with the north end of Lake George. The French can advance on the English one of two ways,--portage over to Lake George and canoe up the lake to Johnson's fort, or ascend the marsh to the south of Lake Champlain, then cross through the woods to Johnson's fort. Dieskau chose the latter trail.

Leaving half his men to guard the baggage, Dieskau bade fifteen hundred picked men follow him on swiftest march with provisions in haversack for only eight days. September 8, 10 A.M., the marchers advance through the woods on Johnson's fort, when suddenly they learn that their scout has lied,--_Johnson himself is still at the fort_. Instead of five hundred are four thousand English. Advancing along the trail V-shape, regulars in the middle, Canadians and Indians on each side, the French come on a company of five hundred English wagoners. In the wild melee of shouts the English retreat in a rabble. "Pursue! March!

Fire! Force the place!" yells Dieskau, das.h.i.+ng forward sword in hand, thinking to follow so closely on the heels of the rabble that he can enter the English fort before the enemy know; but his Indians have forsaken him, and Johnson's scouts have forewarned the approach of the French. Instead of ambus.h.i.+ng {239} the English, Dieskau finds his own army ambushed. He had sneered at the un-uniformed plowboys of the English. "The more there are, the more we shall kill," he had boasted; but now he discovers that the rude bushwhackers, "who fought like boys in the morning, at noon fought like men, and by afternoon fought like devils." Their sharpshooters kept up a crash of fire to the fore, and fifteen hundred doubled on the rear of his army, "folding us up," he reported, "like a pack of cards." Dieskau fell, shot in the leg and in the knee, and a bullet struck the cartridge box of the servant who was was.h.i.+ng out the wounds.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CONTEMPORARY MAP OF THE REGION OF LAKE GEORGE]

"Lay my telescope and coat by me, and go!" ordered Dieskau. "This is as good a deathbed as anyplace. Go!" he thundered, seeing his second officer hesitate. "Don't you see you are needed? Go and sound a retreat."

A third shot penetrated the wounded commander's bladder. Lying alone, propped against a tree, he heard the drums rolling a retreat, when one of the enemy jumped from the woods with pointed pistol.

"Scoundrel!" roared the dauntless Dieskau; "dare to shoot a man weltering in his blood." The fellow proved to be a Frenchman who had long ago deserted to the English, and he muttered {240} out some excuse about shooting the devil before the devil shot him; but when he found out who Dieskau was, he had him carried carefully to Johnson's tent, where every courtesy was bestowed upon the wounded commander. Johnson himself lay wounded.

All that night Iroquois kept breaking past the guard into the tent.

"What do they want?" asked Dieskau feebly.

"To skin you and eat you," returned Johnson laconically. Whose was the victory? The losses had been about even,--two hundred and fifty on each side. Johnson had failed to advance to Crown Point, but Dieskau had failed to dislodge Johnson. If Dieskau had not been captured, it is a question if either side would have considered the fight a victory.

As it was, New France was plunged in grief; joy bells rang in New England. Johnson was given a baronetcy and 5000 pounds for his victory. He had named the lake south of Lake Champlain after the English King, Lake George.

So closed the first act in the tragic struggle for supremacy in America.

{241}

CHAPTER XII

FROM 1756 TO 1763

Bigot at Quebec--New France on verge of ruin--Bigot's vampires suck country's lifeblood--Scene on lake--Ma.s.sacre at Fort William Henry--Louisburg besieged--Surrender of famous fort--The attack at Ticonderoga--Abercrombie's forces flee--Wolfe sails for Quebec--Signal fires forewarn approach of enemy--Both sides become scalp raiders--English fail at Montmorency--Slip silently down the great river--The two armies face each other--Death of Montcalm--Why New France fell

How stand both sides at the opening of the year 1756, on the verge of the Seven Years' War,--the struggle for a continent?

There has been open war for more than a year, but war is not formally declared till May 18, 1756.

Take Acadia first.

The French have been expelled. The infamous Le Loutre is still in prison in England, and when he is released, in 1763, he toils till his death, in 1773, trying to settle the Acadian refugees on some of the French islands of the English Channel. The smiling farms of Grand Pre and Port Royal lie a howling waste. Only a small English garrison holds Annapolis, where long ago Marc L'Escarbot and Champlain held happy revel; and the seat of government has been transferred to Halifax, now a settlement and fort of some five thousand people. So much for the English. Across a narrow arm of the sea is Isle Royal or Cape Breton, where the French are intrenched as at a second Gibraltar in the fortress of Louisburg. Since the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle restored the fort to the French, millions have been spent strengthening its walls, adding to the armaments; but Intendant Bigot has had charge of the funds, and Intendant Bigot has a sponge-like quality of absorbing all funds that flow through his hands. Cannon have been added, but there are not enough b.a.l.l.s to go round. The walls have been repaired, but with false filling (sand in place of mortar), so that the first shatter of artillery will send them clattering down in wet plaster.

Take the Ohio next.

"Beautiful River" is the highway between New France and Louisiana. By Braddock's defeat the English have been driven out to a man. Matters are a thousandfold worse than before, for {242} the savage allies of the French now swarm down the bush road cut by Braddock's army and carry b.l.o.o.d.y havoc to all the frontier settlements of Pennsylvania and Virginia. How many pioneers perished in this border war will never be known. It is a tale by itself, and its story is not part of Canada's history. George Was.h.i.+ngton was the officer in charge of a thousand bushfighters to guard this frontier.

Take the valley of Lake Champlain.

This is the highway of approach to Montreal north, to Albany south.

Johnson had defeated Dieskau here, but neither side was strong enough to advance from the scene of battle into the territory of the enemy.

The English take possession of Lake George and intrench themselves at the south end in Fort William Henry. Sir William Johnson strings a line of forts up the Mohawk River towards Oswego on Lake Ontario, and he keeps his forest rangers, under the famous scout Major Robert Rogers, scouring the forest and mountain trails of Lake Champlain for French marauder and news of what the French are doing. Rogers'