Isle-aux-Noix

After the fall of Niagara, the danger seemed so great, both in the direction of Lake Ontario and that of Lake Champlain, that Lévis had been sent up from Quebec with eight hundred men to command the whole department of Montreal.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in Montcalm and Wolfe, Volume 7 of the French in Canada series. Continuing Chapter 26.

The capture of Niagara was an important stroke. Thenceforth Detroit, Michillimackinac, the Illinois and all the other French interior posts, were severed from Canada and left in helpless isolation; but Amherst was not yet satisfied. On hearing of Prideaux’s death he sent Brigadier Gage to supersede Johnson and take command on Lake Ontario, directing him to descend the St. Lawrence, attack the French posts at the head of the rapids and hold them if possible for the winter. The attempt was difficult; for the French force on the St. Lawrence was now greater than that which Gage could bring against it, after providing for the safety of Oswego and Niagara. Nor was he by nature prone to dashing and doubtful enterprise. He reported that the movement was impossible, much to the disappointment of Amherst, who seemed to expect from subordinates an activity greater than his own.

[Amherst to Gage, 28 July, 1 Aug., 14 Aug., 11 Sept. 1759. Diary of Sir William Johnson, in Stone, Life of Johnson, II. 394-429.]

He, meanwhile, was working at his fort at Crown Point, while the season crept away and Bourlamaque lay ready to receive him at Isle-aux-Noix. “I wait his coming with impatience,” writes the French commander, “though I doubt if he will venture to attack a post where we are intrenched to the teeth and armed with a hundred pieces of cannon.”[1] Bourlamaque now had with him thirty-five hundred men, in a position of great strength. Isle-aux-Noix, planted in mid-channel of the Richelieu soon after it issues from Lake Champlain, had been diligently fortified since the spring. On each side of it was an arm of the river, closed against an enemy with chevaux-de-frise. To attack it in front in the face of its formidable artillery would be a hazardous attempt and the task of reducing it was likely to be a long one. The French force in these parts had lately received accessions. After the fall of Niagara the danger seemed so great, both in the direction of Lake Ontario and that of Lake Champlain, that Lévis had been sent up from Quebec with eight hundred men to command the whole department of Montreal.[2] A body of troops and militia was encamped opposite that town, ready to march towards either quarter, as need might be, while the abundant crops of the neighboring parishes were harvested by armed bands, ready at a word to drop the sickle for the gun.

[1: Bourlamaque à (Bernetz?), 22 Sept. 1759.]

[2: Montcalm à Bourlamaque, 9 Août, 1759. Rigaud à Bourlamaque, 14 Août, 1759. Lévis à Bourlamaque, 25 Août, 1759.]

Thus the promised advance of Amherst into Canada would be not without its difficulties, even when his navy, too tardily begun, should be ready to act its part. But if he showed no haste in succoring Wolfe, he at least made some attempts to communicate with him. Early in August he wrote him a letter, which Ensign Hutchins, of the rangers, carried to him in about a month by the long and circuitous route of the Kennebec and which, after telling the news of the campaign, ended thus: “You may depend on my doing all I can for effectually reducing Canada. Now is the time!”[3] Amherst soon after tried another expedient and sent Captains Kennedy and Hamilton with a flag of truce and a message of peace to the Abenakis of St. Francis, who, he thought, won over by these advances, might permit the two officers to pass unmolested to Quebec. But the Abenakis seized them and carried them prisoners to Montreal; on which Amherst sent Major Robert Rogers and a band of rangers to destroy their town.[4]

[3: Amherst to Wolfe, 7 Aug. 1759.]

[4: Amherst to Pitt, 22 Oct. 1759. Rogers, Journals, 144.]

It was the eleventh of October before the miniature navy of Captain Loring — the floating battery, the brig and the sloop that had been begun three weeks too late — was ready for service. They sailed at once to look for the enemy. The four French vessels made no resistance. One of them succeeded in reaching Isle-aux-Noix; one was run aground; and two were sunk by their crews, who escaped to the shore. Amherst, meanwhile, leaving the provincials to work at the fort, embarked with the regulars in bateaux and proceeded on his northern way till, on the evening of the twelfth, a head-wind began to blow and, rising to a storm, drove him for shelter into Ligonier Bay, on the west side of the lake.[5] On the thirteenth, it blew a gale. The lake raged like an angry sea and the frail bateaux, fit only for smooth water, could not have lived a moment. Through all the next night the gale continued, with floods of driving rain. “I hope it will soon change,” wrote Amherst on the fifteenth, “for I have no time to lose.” He was right. He had waited till the season of autumnal storms, when nature was more dangerous than man. On the sixteenth there was frost and the wind did not abate. On the next morning it shifted to the south but soon turned back with violence to the north and the ruffled lake put on a look of winter, “which determined me,” says the General, “not to lose time by striving to get to the Isle-aux-Noix, where I should arrive too late to force the enemy from their post but to return to Crown Point and complete the works there.” This he did and spent the remnant of the season in the congenial task of finishing the fort, of which the massive remains still bear witness to his industry.

[5: Orderly Book of Commissary Wilson.]

When Lévis heard that the English army had fallen back, he wrote, well pleased, to Bourlamaque: “I don’t know how General Amherst will excuse himself to his Court but I am very glad he let us alone, because the Canadians are so backward that you could count on nobody but the regulars.”

[Lévis à Bourlamaque, 1 Nov. 1759.]

Concerning this year’s operations on the Lakes, it may be observed that the result was not what the French feared, or what the British colonists had cause to hope. If, at the end of winter, Amherst had begun, as he might have done, the building of armed vessels at the head of the navigable waters of Lake Champlain, where Whitehall now stands, he would have had a navy ready to his hand before August and would have been able to follow the retreating French without delay and attack them at Isle-aux-Noix before they had finished their fortifications. And if, at the same time, he had directed Prideaux, instead of attacking Niagara, to co-operate with him by descending the St. Lawrence towards Montreal, the prospect was good that the two armies would have united at the place and ended the campaign by the reduction of all Canada. In this case Niagara and all the western posts would have fallen without a blow.

Major Robert Rogers, sent in September to punish the Abenakis of St. Francis, had addressed himself to the task with his usual vigor. These Indians had been settled for about three quarters of a century on the River St. Francis, a few miles above its junction with the St. Lawrence. They were nominal Christians and had been under the control of their missionaries for three generations; but though zealous and sometimes fanatical in their devotion to the forms of Romanism, they remained thorough savages in dress, habits and character. They were the scourge of the New England borders, where they surprised and burned farmhouses and small hamlets, killed men, women and children without distinction, carried others prisoners to their village, subjected them to the torture of “running the gantlet,” and compelled them to witness dances of triumph around the scalps of parents, children and friends.

Amherst’s instructions to Rogers contained the following: “Remember the barbarities that have been committed by the enemy’s Indian scoundrels. Take your revenge but don’t forget that, though those dastardly villains have promiscuously murdered women and children of all ages, it is my order that no women or children be killed or hurt.”

Rogers and his men set out in whaleboats and, eluding the French armed vessels, then in full activity, came, on the tenth day, to Missisquoi Bay, at the north end of Lake Champlain. Here he hid his boats, leaving two friendly Indians to watch them from a distance and inform him should the enemy discover them. He then began his march for St. Francis, when, on the evening of the second day, the two Indians overtook him with the startling news that a party of about four hundred French had found the boats and that half of them were on his tracks in hot pursuit. It was certain that the alarm would soon be given and other parties sent to cut him off. He took the bold resolution of outmarching his pursuers, pushing straight for St. Francis, striking it before succors could arrive and then returning by Lake Memphremagog and the Connecticut. Accordingly, he dispatched Lieutenant McMullen by a circuitous route back to Crown Point, with a request to Amherst that provisions should be sent up the Connecticut to meet him on the way down. Then he set his course for the Indian town and for nine days more toiled through the forest with desperate energy. Much of the way was through dense spruce swamps, with no dry resting-place at night. At length the party reached the River St. Francis, fifteen miles above the town and, hooking their arms together for mutual support, forded it with extreme difficulty. Towards evening, Rogers climbed a tree and descried the town three miles distant. Accidents, fatigue and illness had reduced his followers to a hundred and forty-two officers and men. He left them to rest for a time and, taking with him Lieutenant Turner and Ensign Avery, went to reconnoiter the place; left his two companions, entered it disguised in an Indian dress and saw the unconscious savages yelling and signing in the full enjoyment of a grand dance. At two o’clock in the morning he rejoined his party and at three led them to the attack, formed them in a semicircle and burst in upon the town half an hour before sunrise. Many of the warriors were absent and the rest were asleep. Some were killed in their beds and some shot down in trying to escape. “About seven o’clock in the morning,” he says, “the affair was completely over, in which time we had killed at least two hundred Indians and taken twenty of their women and children prisoners, fifteen of whom I let go their own way and five I brought with me, namely, two Indian boys and three Indian girls. I likewise retook five English captives.”

English scalps in hundreds were dangling from poles over the doors of the houses.[6] The town was pillaged and burned, not excepting the church, where ornaments of some value were found. On the side of the rangers, Captain Ogden and six men were wounded and a Mohegan Indian from Stockbridge was killed. Rogers was told by his prisoners that a party of three hundred French and Indians was encamped on the river below and that another party of two hundred and fifteen was not far distant. They had been sent to cut off the retreat of the invaders but were doubtful as to their designs till after the blow was struck. There was no time to lose. The rangers made all haste southward, up the St. Francis, subsisting on corn from the Indian town; till, near the eastern borders of Lake Memphremagog, the supply failed and they separated into small parties, the better to sustain life by hunting. The enemy followed close, attacked Ensign Avery’s party and captured five of them; then fell upon a band of about twenty, under Lieutenants Dunbar and Turner and killed or captured nearly all. The other bands eluded their pursuers, turned southeastward, reached the Connecticut, some here, some there and, giddy with fatigue and hunger, toiled wearily down the wild and lonely stream to the appointed rendezvous at the mouth of the Amonoosuc.

[6: Rogers says “about six hundred.” Other accounts say six or seven hundred. The late Abbé Maurault, missionary of the St. Francis Indians and their historian, adopts the latter statement, though it is probably exaggerated.]

From Montcalm and Wolfe, Chapter 26 by Francis Parkman

To be continued.

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Preface to this book.

A very large amount of unpublished material has been used in its preparation, consisting for the most part of documents copied from the archives and libraries of France and England, especially from the Archives de la Marine et des Colonies, the Archives de la Guerre, and the Archives Nationales at Paris, and the Public Record Office and the British Museum at London. The papers copied for the present work in France alone exceed six thousand folio pages of manuscript, additional and supplementary to the “Paris Documents” procured for the State of New York under the agency of Mr. Brodhead. The copies made in England form ten volumes, besides many English documents consulted in the original manuscript. Great numbers of autograph letters, diaries, and other writings of persons engaged in the war have also been examined on this side of the Atlantic.

I owe to the kindness of the present Marquis de Montcalm the permission to copy all the letters written by his ancestor, General Montcalm, when in America, to members of his family in France. General Montcalm, from his first arrival in Canada to a few days before his death, also carried on an active correspondence with one of his chief officers, Bourlamaque, with whom he was on terms of intimacy. These autograph letters are now preserved in a private collection. I have examined them and obtained copies of the whole. They form an interesting complement to the official correspondence of the writer, and throw the most curious side-lights on the persons and events of the time.

Besides manuscripts, the printed matter in the form of books, pamphlets, contemporary newspapers, and other publications relating to the American part of the Seven Years’ War, is varied and abundant; and I believe I may safely say that nothing in it of much consequence has escaped me. The liberality of some of the older States of the Union, especially New York and Pennsylvania, in printing the voluminous records of their colonial history, has saved me a deal of tedious labor.

The whole of this published and unpublished mass of evidence has been read and collated with extreme care, and more than common pains have been taken to secure accuracy of statement. The study of books and papers, however, could not alone answer the purpose. The plan of the work was formed in early youth; and though various causes have long delayed its execution, it has always been kept in view. Meanwhile, I have visited and examined every spot where events of any importance in connection with the contest took place, and have observed with attention such scenes and persons as might help to illustrate those I meant to describe. In short, the subject has been studied as much from life and in the open air as at the library table.

BOSTON, Sept. 16, 1884.

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