Canada: the Empire of the North

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[Illustration: 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 shelled it into kindling wood with
his heavy artillery. Beaujeu, an officer under Contrecoeur, had
volunteered to go out and meet the English. "My son, my son, will you
walk into the arms of death?" demanded the Indian chiefs. "My fathers,
will you allow me to go alone?" answered Beaujeu; and out he sallied
with six hundred picked men. It was Beaujeu whom Braddock's men had
seen dash out and wave his hat. The brave Frenchman fell, shot at the
first {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 damnation in the next. Day dawn of June 4 the bugles blew to arms
and the English forces, some four thousand, had marched to the south
shore of the Missaguash River, when the French on the north side
uttered a whoop and emitted a clatter of shots. Black-hatted,
sinister, tireless, the priest could be seen urging his Indians on.
The English brought up three field cannon and under protection of their
scattering fire laid a pontoon bridge. Crossing the river, they
marched within a mile of the fort. That night the sky was alight with
flame; for Vergor, the French commander, and 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 ship was captured by an English cruiser and
he was imprisoned for eight years on the island of Jersey.

[Illustration: 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 massacre on their peaceful
settlements. Besides, had not the priest assured them year in and year
out that France would recover Acadia and put to the sword those
habitants who had forsworn France? And they had been equally afraid to
side with the French, for in case of failure the burden of punishment
would fall on them alone. For almost half a century they had been
known as _Neutrals_. Of their population of 12,000, 3000 had been
lured away to Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton. When Cornwallis
had founded Halifax he had intended to wait only till the English were
firmly established, when he would demand an oath of unqualified
allegiance from {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 assume the responsibility he did. In
addition, Lawrence was a bigoted Protestant. He not only hated the
Acadians because they were French; he hated them as "a colony of
rattlesnakes" because they were Catholics; and being an Englishman, he
despised them {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 bloody slaughter of
the Monongahela was known everywhere else in America from Quebec to New
Spain. With Lawrence and Monckton and Murray and Boscawen and the
other English generals sent to conduct the campaign in Acadia, the
question was what to do with the French habitants. Let two facts be
distinctly stated here and with great emphasis: first, the colonial
officers, like Winslow from Massachusetts, knew absolutely nothing of
the English officers' plans; they were not admitted to the conferences
of the English officers and were simply expected to obey orders;
second, the English government knew absolutely nothing of the English
officers' course till it was too late for remedy. In fact, later
dispatches of that year inquire sharply what Lawrence meant by an
obscure threat to drive the Acadians out of the country.

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

It is the blackest crime that ever took place under the British flag,
and the expulsion was only the beginning of the sufferers' woes. Some
people found their way to Quebec, but Quebec was destitute and in the
throes of war. The wanderers came to actual starvation. The others
wandered homeless in Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, in
Louisiana. After the peace of 1763 some eight hundred gathered
together in Boston and began the long march overland through the
forests of Maine and New Brunswick, to return to Acadia. Singing
hymns, dragging their baggage on sleighs, pausing to hunt by the way,
these sad pilgrims toiled more than one thousand miles through forest
and swamp, and at the end of two years found themselves back in Acadia.
But they were like ghosts of the dead revisiting scenes of childhood!
Their lands were occupied by new owners. Of their herds naught
remained but the bleaching bone heaps where the lowing cattle had
huddled in winter storms. New faces filled their old houses. Strange
children rambled beneath the little dormer windows of the Acadian
cottages, and the voices of the boys at play in the apple orchards
shouted in an alien tongue. The very names of the places had vanished.
Beausejour was now Cumberland. Beaubassin 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?

[Illustration: 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 rushing
up the Richelieu River with three thousand soldiers, part regulars,
part Canadians. Crown Point--called Fort Frederick by the French--was
reached in August. No English are here, but scouts bring word that
Johnson has built a fort on the south end of Lake George, and, leaving
only five hundred men to garrison it, is moving up the lake with his
main troops.

{238}

[Illustration: 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, dashing forward sword in hand,
thinking to follow so closely on the heels of the rabble that he can
enter the English fort before the enemy know; but his Indians have
forsaken him, and Johnson's scouts have forewarned the approach of the
French. Instead of ambushing {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
washing out the wounds.

[Illustration: 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--Massacre at Fort William
Henry--Louisburg besieged--Surrender of famous fort--The attack at
Ticonderoga--Abercrombie's forces flee--Wolfe sails for Quebec--Signal
fires forewarn approach of enemy--Both sides become scalp
raiders--English fail at Montmorency--Slip silently down the great
river--The two armies face each other--Death of Montcalm--Why New
France fell

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

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

Take Acadia first.

The French have been expelled. The infamous Le Loutre is still in
prison in England, and when he is released, in 1763, he toils till his
death, in 1773, trying to settle the Acadian refugees on some of the
French islands of the English Channel. The smiling farms of Grand 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 balls to go round. The walls have been
repaired, but with false filling (sand in place of mortar), so that the
first shatter of artillery will send them clattering down in wet
plaster.

Take the Ohio next.

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

Take the valley of Lake Champlain.

This is the highway of approach to Montreal north, to Albany south.
Johnson had defeated Dieskau here, but neither side was strong enough
to advance from the scene of battle into the territory of the enemy.
The English take possession of Lake George and intrench themselves at
the south end in Fort William Henry. Sir William Johnson strings a
line of forts up the Mohawk River towards Oswego on Lake Ontario, and
he keeps his forest rangers, under the famous scout Major Robert
Rogers, scouring the forest and mountain trails of Lake Champlain for
French marauder and news of what the French are doing. Rogers'
Rangers, too, are a story by themselves, but a story which does not
concern Canada. Skating and snowshoeing by winter, canoeing by night
in summer, Rogers passed and repassed the enemy's lines times without
number, as if his life were charmed, though once his wrist was shot
when he had nothing to stanch the blood but the ribbon tying his wig,
and once he stumbled back exhausted to Fort William Henry, to lie
raging with smallpox for the winter. Among the forest rangers of New
Hampshire and New York, Major Robert Rogers was without a peer. No
danger was too great, no feat too daring, for his band of scouts. The
English have established Fort William Henry at the south end of Lake
George. The French checkmate the move by strengthening Crown Point on
Lake Champlain and moving a pace farther south into English
territory,--to Carillon, where the waters of Lake George pour into
Champlain. Here on a high angle between the river and the lake,
commanding all travel north and south, the French build Carillon or
Fort Ticonderoga.

{243} As for the Great Northwest, New France with her string of
posts--Frontenac, Niagara, Detroit, Michilimackinac, Kaministiquia
(Fort William), Fort Rogue (Winnipeg), Portage la Prairie--stretches
clear across to the foothills of the Rockies. The English fur traders
of Hudson Bay have, in 1754, sent Anthony Hendry up the Saskatchewan,
but when Hendry comes back with word of equestrian Indians--the
Blackfeet on horseback--and treeless plains, the English set him down
as a lying impostor. Indians on horseback! They had never seen
Indians but in canoes and on snowshoes! Hendry was dismissed as
unreliable, and no Englishman went up the Saskatchewan for another ten
years.

If the disasters of 1755 did nothing more, they at last stirred the
home governments to action. Earl Loudon is sent out in 1756 to command
the English, and to New France in May comes Louis Joseph, Marquis de
Montcalm, age forty-four, soldier, scholar, country gentleman, with a
staff composed of Chevalier de Levis, Bourlamaque, and one
Bougainville, to become famous as a navigator.

Though New France consists of a good three quarters of America, things
are in evil plight that causes Montcalm many sleepless nights.
Vaudreuil, the French governor, descendant of that Vaudreuil who long
ago set the curse of Indian warfare on the borders of New England, had
expected to be appointed chief commander of the troops and jealously
resents Montcalm's coming. With the Governor is leagued Intendant
Bigot, come up from Louisburg. Bigot is a man of sixty, of noble
birth, a favorite of the butterfly woman who rules the King of
France,--the Pompadour,--and he has come to New France to mend his
fortunes. How he planned to do it one may guess from his career at
Louisburg; but Quebec offered better field, and it was to Bigot's
interest to ply Montcalm and Vaudreuil with such tittle-tattle of
enmity as would foment jealousy, keep their attention on each other,
and their eyes off his own doings. As he had done at Louisburg, so he
now did at Quebec. The King was requisitioned for enormous sums to
strengthen the fort. Bigot's {244} ring of friends acted as
contractors. The outlay was enormous, the results trifling. "I
think," complained the King, "that Quebec must be fortified in gold, it
has cost so much." It was time of war. Enormous sums were to be
expended for presents to keep the Indians loyal; and the King complains
that he cannot understand how baubles of beads and powderhorns cost so
much, or how the western tribes seem to become more and more numerous,
or how the French officers, who distribute the presents, become
millionaires in a few years. A friend of Bigot's handled these funds.
There are meat contracts for the army. A worthless, lowbred scamp is
named commissary general. He handles these contracts, and he, too,
swiftly graduates into the millionaire class, is hail-fellow well met
with Bigot, drinks deep at the Intendant's table, and gambles away as
much as $40,000 in a single night. It is time of war, and it is time
of famine too; for the crops have failed. Every inhabitant between the
ages of fifteen and fifty has been drafted into the army. Not counting
Indians, there is an army of fifteen to twenty thousand to be fed; so
Bigot compels the habitants to sell him provisions at a low price.
These provisions he resells to the King for the army and to the
citizens at famine prices. The King's warehouse down by the
Intendant's palace becomes known as La Friponne,--The Cheat.

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