Canada: the Empire of the North

A >> Agnes C. Laut >> Canada: the Empire of the North

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Of all the hotbeds of intrigue, Acadia, from its position, had become
the worst. Here was a population of French farmers, which in half a
century had increased to 12,000, held in subjection by an English
garrison at Annapolis of less than two hundred soldiers so destitute
they had neither shoes nor stockings, coats nor bedding. The French
were guaranteed in the Treaty of Utrecht the freedom and privileges of
their religion by the English; but in matters temporal as well as
spiritual they were absolutely subject to priests, acting as spies for
the Quebec plotters.

France, as has been told, retained Cape Breton (Isle Royal) and Prince
Edward Island (Isle St. Jean), and the Treaty of Utrecht had hardly
been signed before plans were drawn on a magnificent scale for a French
fort on Cape Breton to effect a threefold purpose,--to command the sea
towards Boston, to regain Acadia, to protect the approach to the River
St. Lawrence.

The Island of Cape Breton is like a hand with its fingers stuck out in
the sea. The very tip of a long promontory commanding one of the
southern arms of the sea was chosen for the fort that was to be the
strongest in all America. On three sides were the sea, with outlying
islands suitable for powerful batteries and a harbor entrance that was
both narrow and deep. To the rear was impassable muskeg--quaking moss
above water-soaked bog. Two weaknesses only had the fort. There were
hills to right and left from which an enemy might pour destruction
inside the walls, but the royal engineers of France depended on the
outlying island batteries preventing any enemy gaining possession of
these hills. By 1720 walls thirty-six feet thick had encircled {215}
an area of over one hundred acres. Outside the rear wall had been
excavated a ditch forty feet deep and eighty wide. Bristling from the
six bastions of the walls were more than one hundred and eighty heavy
cannon. Besides the two batteries commanding the entrance to the
harbor was an outer Royal Battery of forty cannon directly across the
water from the fort, on the next finger of the island. Twenty years
was the fort in building, costing what in those days was regarded as an
enormous sum of money,--equal to $10,000,000. Such was Louisburg,
impregnable as far as human foresight could judge,--the refuge of
corsairs that preyed on Boston commerce; the haven of the schemers who
intrigued to wean away the Acadians from English rule, the guardian
sentinel of all approach to the St. Lawrence.

"It would be well," wrote the King the very next year after the treaty
was signed, "to attract the Acadians to Cape Breton, but act with
caution." And now twenty years had passed. Some Acadians had gone to
Cape Breton and others to Prince Edward Island; but statecraft judged
the simple Acadian farmer would be more useful where he was,--on the
spot in Acadia, ready to rebel when open war would give the French of
Louisburg a chance to invade.

Late in 1744 Europe breaks into that flame of war known as the Austrian
Succession. Before either Quebec or Boston knows of open war,
Louisburg has word of it and sends her rangers burning fishing towns
and battering at the rotten palisades of Annapolis (Port Royal). Port
Royal is commanded by that same Paul Mascarene of former wars, grown
old in service. The French bid him save himself by surrender before
their fleet comes. Though Mascarene has less than a hundred men, the
weather is in his favor. It is September. Winter will drive the
invaders home, so he sends back word that he will bide his time till
the hostile fleet comes. As for the Abbe Le Loutre, let the
treacherous priest beware how he brings his murderous Indians within
range of the fort guns! Meanwhile the Acadian habitants are threatened
with death if they do not rise to aid the {216} French, but they too
bide their time, for if they rebel and fail, that too means death; and
"_the Neutrals_" refuse to stir till the invaders, from lack of
provisions, are forced to decamp, and the Abbe Le Loutre, with his
black hat drawn down over his eyes, vanishes into forest with his crew
of painted warriors.

News of the war and of the ravaging of Acadian fishing towns set
Massachusetts in flame. To Boston, above all New England towns, was
Louisburg a constant danger. The thing seemed absolute stark
madness,--the thoughtless daring of foolhardy enthusiasts,--but it is
ever enthusiasm which accomplishes the impossible; and April 30, 1745,
after only seven weeks of preparation, an English fleet of sixty-eight
ships--some accounts say ninety, including the whalers and transports
gathered along the coast towns--sails into Gabarus Bay, behind
Louisburg, where the waters have barely cleared of ice. William
Pepperrell, a merchant, commands the four thousand raw levies of
provincial troops, the most of whom have never stepped to martial music
before in their lives. Admiral Warren has come up from West India
waters with his men-of-war to command the united fleets. Early Monday
morning, against a shore wind, the boats are tacking to land, when the
alarm bells begin ringing and ringing at Louisburg and a force of one
hundred and fifty men dashes downshore for Flat Cove to prevent the
landing. Pepperrell out-tricks the enemy by leaving only a few boats
to make a feint of landing at the Cove, while he swings his main fleet
inshore round a bend in the coast a mile away. Here, with a prodigious
rattling of lowered sails and anchor chains, the crews plunge over the
rolling waves, pontooning a bridge of small boats ashore. By nightfall
the most of the English have landed, and spies report the harbor of
Louisburg alive with torches where the French are sinking ships to
obstruct the entrance and setting fire to fishing stages that might
interfere with cannon aim. The next night, May 1, Vaughan's New
Hampshire boys--raw farmers, shambling in their gait, singing as they
march--swing through the woods along the marsh {217} behind the fort,
and take up a position on a hill to the far side of Louisburg, creating
an enormous bonfire with the French tar and ships' tackling stored
here. The result of this harmless maneuver was simply astounding. It
will be recalled that Louisburg had an outer battery of forty cannon on
this side. The French soldiers holding this battery mistook the
bonfire for the {218} English attacking forces, and under cover of
darkness abandoned the position,--battery, guns, powder and all,--which
the English promptly seized. This was the Royal Battery, which
commanded the harbor and could shell into the very heart of the fort.

[Illustration: WILLIAM PEPPERRELL]

The next thing for the English was to get their heavy guns ashore
through a rolling surf of ice-cold water. For two weeks the men stood
by turns to their necks in the surf, steadying the pontoon gangway as
the great cannon were trundled ashore; and this was the least of their
difficulties. The question was how to get their cannon across the
marsh behind the fort to the hill on the far side. The cannon would
sink from their own weight in such a bog, and either horses or oxen
would flounder to death in a few minutes. Again, the fool-hardy
enthusiasm of the raw levies overcame the difficulty. They built large
stone boats, raft-shaped, such as are used on farms to haul stones over
ground too rough for wagons. Hitching to these, teams of two hundred
men stripped to midwaist, they laboriously hauled the cannon across the
quaking moss to the hills commanding the rear of the fort, bombs and
balls whizzing overhead all the while, fired from the fort bastions.
It was cold, damp spring weather. The men who were not soaked to their
necks in surf and bog were doing picket duty alongshore, sleeping in
their boots. Consequently, in three weeks, half Pepperrell's force
became deadly ill. At this time, within two days, occurred both a
cheering success and a disheartening rebuff. A French man-of-war with
seventy cannon and six hundred men was seen entering Louisburg. As if
in panic fright, one of the small English ships fled. The French ship
pursued. In a trice she was surrounded by the English fleet and
captured. The flight of the little vessel had been a trick. A few
days later four hundred English in whaleboats attempted the mad project
of attacking the Island Battery at the harbor entrance. The boats set
out about midnight with muffled oars, but a wind rose, setting a
tremendous surf lashing the rocks, and yet the invaders might have
succeeded but for a piece of rashness. A hundred men had gained the
shore when, with the thoughtlessness of schoolboys, they uttered a
jubilant yell. {219} Instantly, porthole, platform, gallery, belched
death through the darkness. The story is told that a raw New England
lad was in the act of climbing the French flagstaff to hang out his own
red coat as English flag when a Swiss guard hacked him to pieces. The
boats not yet ashore were sunk by the blaze of cannon. A few escaped
back in the darkness, but by daylight over one hundred English had been
captured. Cannon, mortars, and musketoons were mounted to command the
fort inside the walls, and a continuous rain of fire began from the
hills. In vain Duchambon, the French commander, waited for
reenforcements from Canada. Convent, hospital, barracks, all the
houses of the town, were peppered by bombs till there was not a roof
intact in the place. The soldiers, of whom there were barely two
thousand, were ready to mutiny. The citizens besought Duchambon to
surrender. Provisions ran out. Looking down from the tops of the
walls, cracking jokes with the English across the ditch, the French
soldiers counted more than a thousand scaling ladders ready for
hand-to-hand assault, and a host of barrels filled with mud behind
which the English sharpshooters crouched. It had just been arranged
between Warren and Pepperrell that the {220} former should attack by
sea while the latter assaulted by land, when on June 16 the French
capitulated. How the New England enthusiasts ran rampant through the
abandoned French fort need not be told. How Parson Moody, famous for
his long prayers, hewed down images in the Catholic chapel till he was
breathless and then came to the officers' state dinner so exhausted
that when asked to pronounce blessing he could only mutter, "Good Lord,
we have so much to thank Thee for, time is too short; we must leave it
to eternity. Amen"; how the New Englanders, unused to French wines,
drank themselves torpid on the stores of the fort cellar; how the
French the next year made superhuman effort to regain Louisburg, only
to have a magnificent fleet of one hundred and fifty sail wrecked on
Sable Island, Duke d'Anville, the commander, dying of heartbreak on his
ship anchored near Halifax, his successor killing himself with his own
sword,--cannot be told here. Louisburg was the prize of the war, and
England threw the prize away by giving it back to France in the Treaty
of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. The English government paid back the
colonies for their outlay, but of all the rich French pirate ships
loaded with booty, captured at Louisburg by leaving the French flag
flying, not a penny's worth went to the provincial troops. Warren's
seamen received all the loot.

[Illustration: RUINS OF THE FORTIFICATIONS AT LOUISBURG]

Like all preceding treaties, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle left
unsettled the boundaries between New France and New England. In
Acadia, in New York, on the Ohio, collisions were bound to come.

In Acadia the English send their officers to the Isthmus of Chignecto
to establish a fort near the bounds of what are now Nova Scotia and New
Brunswick. The priestly spy, Louis Joseph Le Loutre, leads his wild
Micmac savages through the farm settlement round the English fort,
setting fire to houses putting a torch even to the church, and so
compelling the habitants of the boundary to come over to the French and
take sides. The treaty has restored Louisburg to the French, but the
very {221} next year England sends out Edward Cornwallis with two
thousand settlers to establish the English fort now known as Halifax.
By 1752 there are four thousand people at the new fort, though the
Indian raiders miss no occasion to shoot down wayfarers and farmers;
and the French Governor at Quebec continues his bribes--as much as
eight hundred dollars a year to a man--to stir up hostility to the
English and prevent the Acadian farmers taking the oath of fidelity to
England. So much for the peace treaty in Acadia. It was not peace; it
was farce.

[Illustration: CONTEMPORARY PLAN OF THE ATTACK ON LOUISBURG]

In New York state matters were worse. The Iroquois had been
acknowledged allies of the English, and before 1730 the English fort at
Oswego had been built at the southeast corner of Lake Ontario to catch
the fur trade of the northern tribes coming down the lakes to New
France, and to hold the Iroquois' friendship. Also, as French traders
pass up the lake to Fort Frontenac (Kingston) and Niagara with their
national flag flying from the prow of canoe and flatboat, chance
bullets from the {222} English fort ricochet across the advancing
prows, and soldiers on the galleries inside Fort Oswego take bets on
whether they can hit the French flag. Prompt as a gamester, New France
checkmates this move. Peter Schuyler has been settling English farmers
round Lake Champlain. At Crown Point, long known as Scalp Point, where
the lake narrows and portage runs across to Lake George and the Mohawk
land, the French in 1731 erect a strong fort. As for the English
traders at Fort Oswego catching the tribes from the north, New France
counterchecks that by sending Portneuf in April of 1749, only a year
after the peace, to the Toronto portage where the Indians come from the
Upper Lakes by way of Lake Simcoe. What is now known as Toronto is
named Rouille, after a French minister; and as if this were not
checkmate enough to the English advancing westward, the Sulpician
priest from Montreal, Abbe Picquet, zealously builds a fort straight
north of Oswego, on the south side of the St. Lawrence, to keep the
Iroquois loyal to France. Picquet calls his fort "Presentation." His
enemies call it "Picquet's Folly." It is known to-day as Ogdensburg.
Look at the map. France's frontier line is guarded by forts that stand
like sentinels at the gateways of all waters leading to the
interior,--Ogdensburg, Kingston, Toronto, Niagara, Detroit,
Michilimackinac, and La Verendrye's string of forts far west as the
Rockies. New York's frontier line is guarded by one fort
only,--Oswego. Here too, as in Acadia, the peace is a farce.

[Illustration: FORT PRESENTATION]

But it was in the valley of the Ohio where the greatest struggle over
boundaries took place. One year after the peace, Celoron de Bienville
is sent in July, 1749, to take possession of the {223} Ohio for France.
France claims right to this region by virtue of La Salle's explorations
sixty years previously, and of all those French bushrangers who have
roved the wilds from the Great Lakes to Louisiana. Small token did
France take of La Salle's exploits while he lived, but great store do
her statesmen set by his voyages now that he has been sixty years dead.
"But pause!" commands the English Governor of Virginia. "Since time
immemorial have our traders wandered over the Great Smoky Mountains,
over the Cumberlands, over the Alleghenies, down the Tennessee and the
Kanawha and the Monongahela and the Ohio to the Mississippi." As a
matter of fact, one Major General Wood had in 1670 and 1674 sent his
men overland, if not so far as the Mississippi, then certainly as far
as the Ohio and the valley of the Mississippi. But Wood was a private
adventurer. For years his exploit had been forgotten. No record of it
remained but an account written by his men, Batts and Hallam. The
French declared the record was a myth, and it has, in fact, been so
regarded by the most of historians. Yet, curiously enough, ranging
through some old family papers of the Hudson's Bay Company in the
Public Records, London, I found with Wood's own signature his record of
the trip across the mountains to the Indians of the Ohio and the
Mississippi. It is probable that the {224} English cared quite as much
for claims founded on La Salle's voyage as the French cared for claims
founded on the horseback trip of Major General Wood's men. The fact
remained: here were the English traders from Virginia pressing
northward by way of the Ohio; here were the French adventurers pressing
south by way of the Ohio. As in Acadia and New York, peace or no
peace, a clash was inevitable.

[Illustration: CONTEMPORARY VIEW OF OSWEGO]

Duquesne has come out governor of Canada, and by 1753 has dispatched a
thousand men into the Ohio valley, who blaze a trail through the
wilderness and string a line of forts from Presqu' Isle (Erie) on Lake
Erie southward to Fort Duquesne at the junction of the Allegheny and
Monongahela, where Pittsburg stands to-day.

One December night at Fort Le Boeuf, on the trail to the Ohio, the
French commandant was surprised to see a slim youth of twenty years
ride out of the rain-drenched, leafless woods, followed by four or five
whites and Indians with a string of belled pack-horses. The young
gentleman introduces himself with great formality, though he must use
an interpreter, for he does not speak French. He is Major George
Washington, sent by Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to know why the
French have been seizing the fur posts of English traders in this
region. The French commander, Saint Pierre, receives the young
Virginian courteously, plies master and men with such lavish
hospitality that Washington has much trouble to keep his drunk Indians
from deserting, and dismisses his visitor with the smooth but bootless
response that as France and England are at peace he cannot answer
Governor Dinwiddie's message till he has heard from the Governor of
Canada, Marquis Duquesne. Not much satisfaction for emissaries who had
forded ice-rafted rivers and had tramped the drifted forests for three
hundred miles.

[Illustration: GOVERNOR DINWIDDIE OF VIRGINIA]

By January of 1754 Washington is back in Virginia. By May he is on the
trail again, blazing a path through the wilderness down the Monongahela
towards the French fort; for what purpose one may guess, though these
were times of piping peace. Come {225} an old Indian chief and an
English bushwhacker one morning with word that fifty French raiders are
on the trail ten miles away; for what purpose one may guess, spite of
peace. Instantly Washington sends half a hundred Virginia frontiersmen
out scouting. They find no trace of raiders, but the old chief picks
up the trail of the ambushed French. Here they had broken branches
going through the woods; there a moccasin track punctures the spongy
mold; here leaves have been scattered to hide camp ashes. At midnight,
with the rain slashing through the forest black as pitch, Washington
sets out with forty men, following his Indian guide. Through the dark
they feel rather than follow the trail, and it is a slow but an easy
trick to those acquainted with wildwood travel. Leave the path by as
much as a foot length and the foliage lashes you back, or the windfall
trips you up, or the punky path becomes punctured beneath moccasin
tread. By day dawn, misty and gray in the May woods, the English are
at the Indian camp and march forward escorted by the redskins, single
file, silent as ghosts, alert as tigers. Raindrip swashes on the
buckskin coats. Muskets are loaded and carefully cased from the wet.
The old chief stops suddenly . . . and points! There lie the French in
a rock ravine sheltered by the woods like a cave. The next instant the
French had leaped up with a whoop. Washington shouted "Fire!" When
the smoke of the musket crash cleared, ten French lay dead, among them
their officer, Jumonville; {226} and twenty-two others surrendered. No
need to dispute whether Washington was justified in firing on thirty
bush rovers in time of peace! The bushrovers had already seized
English forts and were even now scouring the country for English
traders. For a week their scouts had followed Washington as spies.

Expecting instant retaliation from Fort Duquesne, Washington retreated
swiftly to his camping place at Great Meadows and cast up a log
barricade known as Fort Necessity. A few days later comes a company of
regular troops. By July 1 he has some four hundred men, but at Fort
Duquesne are fourteen hundred French. The French wait only for orders
from Quebec, then march nine hundred bushrovers against Washington.
July 3, towards midday, they burst from the woods whooping and yelling.
Washington chose to meet them on the open ground, but the French were
pouring a cross fire over the meadow; and to compel them to attack in
the open, Washington drew his men behind the barricade. By nightfall
the Virginians were out of powder. Twelve had been killed and
forty-three were wounded. Before midnight the French beat a parley.
All they desired was that the English evacuate the fort. To fight
longer would have risked the extermination of Washington's troops.
Terms of honorable surrender were granted, and the next day--the day
which Washington was to make immortal, July 4--the English retreated
from Fort Necessity. Such was the peace in the Ohio valley.

Though the peace is still continued, England dispatches in 1755 two
regiments of the line under Major General Braddock to protect Virginia,
along with a fleet of twelve men-of-war under Admiral Boscawen. France
keeps up the farce by sending out Baron Dieskau with three thousand
soldiers and Admiral La Motte with eighteen ships. Coasting off
Newfoundland, the English encounter three of the French ships that have
gone astray in the fog. "Is it peace or war?" shout the French across
decks. "Peace," answers a voice from the English deck; and
instantaneously a hurricane cannonade rakes the decks of the French,
killing eighty. Two of the French ships surrendered. The other
escaped through the fog. Such was the peace!

{227} So began the famous Seven Years' War; and Major General Braddock,
in session with the colonial governors, plans the campaign that is to
crush New France's pretensions south of the Great Lakes. Acadia, Lake
Champlain, the Ohio,--these are to be the theaters of the contest.

[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF WASHINGTON'S JOURNAL]

Braddock himself, accompanied by Washington, marches with twenty-two
hundred men over the Alleghenies along the old trail of the Monongahela
against Fort Duquesne. Of Braddock, the least said the better. A
gambler, full of arrogant contempt towards all people and things that
were not British, hail-fellow-well-met to his boon companions,
heartless towards all outside the pale of his own pride, a blustering
bully yet dogged, and withal a gentleman after the standard of the age,
he was neither better nor worse than the times in which he lived. Of
Braddock's men, fifteen hundred were British regulars, the rest
Virginian bushfighters; and the redcoat troops held such contempt
towards the buckskin frontiersmen that friction arose from the first
about the relative rank of regulars and provincials. From the time
they set out, the troops had been retarded by countless delays. There
was trouble buying up supplies of beef cattle {228} among the
frontiersmen. Scouts scoured the country for horses and wagons to haul
the great guns and heavy artillery. Braddock's high mightiness would
take no advice from colonials about single-file march on a bush trail
and swift raids to elude ambushed foes. Everything proceeded slowly,
ponderously, with the system and routine of an English guardroom.
Scouts to the fore and on both flanks, three hundred bushwhackers went
ahead widening the bridle path to a twelve-foot road for the wagons;
and along this road moved the troops, five and six abreast, the red
coats agleam through the forest foliage, drums rolling, flags flying,
steps keeping time as if on parade, Braddock and his officers mounted
on spirited horses, the heavy artillery and supply wagons lagging far
behind in a winding line.

[Illustration: A SKETCH OF THE FIELD OF BATTLE AT BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT]

What happened has been told times without number in story and history.
It was what the despised colonials feared and any bushranger could have
predicted. July 9, in stifling heat, the marchers had come to a loop
in the Monongahela River. Braddock thought to avoid the loop by
fording twice. He was now within eight miles of Fort Duquesne--the
modern Pittsburg. Though Indian raiders had scalped some wanderers
from the trail and insolent messages had been occasionally found
scrawled in French on birch trees, not a Frenchman had been seen on the
march. The advance guard had crossed the second ford about midday when
the road makers at a little opening beyond the river saw a white man
clothed in buckskin, but wearing an officer's badge, dash out of the
woods to the fore, wave his hat, . . . and disappear. A moment later
the well-known war whoop of the French bushrovers tore the air to
tatters; and bullets rained from ambushed foes in a sheet of fire. In
vain the English drums rolled . . . and rolled . . . and soldiers
shouted, "The King! God save the King!" One officer tried to rally
his men to rush the woods, but they were shot down by a torrent of
bullets from an unseen foe. The Virginian bushfighters alone knew how
to meet such an emergency. Jumping from tree to tree for shelter like
Indians dancing sideways to avoid the enemy's aim, they had broken from
rank to fight in bushman fashion when Braddock {229} came galloping
furiously from the rear and ordered them back in line. What use was
military rank with an invisible foe? As well shoot air as an unseen
Indian! Again the Virginians broke rank, and the regulars, huddled
together like cattle in the shambles, fired blindly and succeeded only
in hitting their own provincial troops. Braddock stormed and swore and
rode like a fury incarnate, roaring orders which no one could hear,
much less obey. Five horses were shot under him and the dauntless
commander had mounted a fresh one when the big guns came plunging
forward; but the artillery on which Braddock had pinned his faith only
plowed pits in the forest mold. Of eighty officers, sixty had fallen
and a like proportion of men. Braddock ordered a retreat. The march
became a panic, the panic frenzied terror, the men who had stood so
stolidly under withering fire now dashing in headlong flight from the
second to the first ford and back over the trail, breathless as if
pursued by demons! Artillery, cattle, supplies, dispatch boxes,--all
were abandoned. Washington's clothes had been riddled by bullets, but
he had escaped injury. Braddock reeled from his horse mortally
wounded, to be carried {230} back on a litter to that scene of
Washington's surrender the year before. Four days later the English
general died there. Of the English troops, more than a thousand lay
dead, blistering in the July sun, maimed and scalped by the Indians.
Braddock was buried in his soldier's coat beside the trail, all signs
of the grave effaced to prevent vandalism.

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