Canada: the Empire of the North Part 18

It was a fair scene that greeted them, such a scene as any westerner may witness to-day of a warm September night when the sun hangs low like a blood-red s.h.i.+eld, and the evening breeze touches the rustling gra.s.ses of the prairie beyond the city to the waves of an ocean. It was not the Western Sea, but it was a Sea of Prairie. It was a New World, unbounded by hill or forest, s.p.a.cious as the very airs of heaven, fenced only by the blue dip of a s.h.i.+mmering horizon. It was a world, though La Verendrye knew it not, five times larger than New France, half as big as all Europe. He had discovered the Canadian Northwest.

One can guess how the tired wanderers at rest beneath the uptilted canoes that night wondered whither their quest would lead them over the fire-dyed horizon where the sun was sinking as over a sea. The Cree chiefs told them of other lands and other peoples to the south, "who trade with a people who dwelt on the great waters beyond the mountains of the setting sun,"--the Spaniards.

Leaving men to knock up a trading post near the suburb now known as Fort Rouge, La Verendrye, on September 26, steers his canoes up the shallow a.s.siniboine far as what is now known as Portage La Prairie, where a trail leads overland to the Saskatchewan and so down to the English traders of Hudson Bay. But this is not the trail to the Western Sea; La Verendrye's quest is set towards those people "who live on the great waters to the south."

{211}

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAP SHOWING THE SUPPOSED SEA OF THE WEST, WITH APPROACHES TO THE MISSISSIPPI AND GREAT LAKES, PARIS, 1755]

Fort de La Reine is built at the Portage of the Prairie, and October 18, to beat of drum, with flag flying, La Verendrye marches forth with fifty-two men towards Souris River for the land of the Mandanes on the Missouri. December 3 he is welcomed to the Mandane villages; but here is no Western Sea, only the broad current of the Missouri rolling turbulent and muddy southward towards the Mississippi; but the Mandanes tell of a people to the far west, "who live on the great waters bitter for drinking, who dress in armor and dwell in stone houses." These must be the Spaniards. La Verendrye's quest has become a receding phantom. Leaving men to learn the Missouri dialects, La Verendrye marched in the teeth of mid-winter storms back to the Portage of the Prairie on the a.s.siniboine. Of that march, s.p.a.ce forbids to tell. A blizzard raged, driving the fine snows into eyes and skin like hot salt. When the marchers camped at night they had to bury themselves in snow to keep from freezing. Drifts covered all landmarks. The men lost their bearings, doubled back on their own tracks, were frost-bitten, buffeted by the storm, and short of food. Christmas {212} was pa.s.sed in the camps of wandering a.s.siniboines, and February 10, 1739, the fifty men staggered, weak and starving, back to the Portage of the Prairie.

The wanderings of La Verendrye and his sons for the next few years led southwestward far as the Rockies in the region of Montana, northwestward far as the Bow River branch of the Saskatchewan.

Meanwhile, all La Verendrye's property had been seized by his creditors. Jealous rivals were clamoring for possession of his fur posts. The King had conferred on him the Order of the Cross of St.

Louis, but eighteen years of exposure and worry had broken the explorer's health. On the eve of setting out again for the west he died suddenly on the 6th of December, 1749, at Montreal.

Look again at the map! The spokes of the wheel running out from Quebec extend to the Gulf of Mexico on the south, to the Rockies on the west, to Hudson Bay on the north. And the population of New France does not yet number 60,000 people. Is it any wonder French Canadians look back on these days as the Golden Age?

And while the bushrovers of Canada are pus.h.i.+ng their way through the wilderness westward, there come slas.h.i.+ng, tramping, swearing, stamping through the mountainous wilds of West and East Siberia the Cossack soldiers of Peter the Great, led by the Dane, Vitus Bering, bound on discovery to the west coast of America. La Verendrye's men have crossed only half a continent. Bering's Russians cross the width of two continents, seven thousand miles, then launch their crazily planked s.h.i.+ps over unknown northern seas for America. From 1729 to August of 1742 toil the Russian sea voyagers. Their story is not part of Canada's history. Suffice to say, December of 1741 finds the Russian crews cast away on two desert islands of Bering Sea west of Alaska, now known as the Commander Islands. Half the crew of seventy-seven perish of starvation and scurvy. Bering himself lies dying in a sandpit, with the earth spread over him for warmth. Outside the sand holes, {213} where the Russians crouch, scream hurricane gales and white billows and myriad sea birds. The s.h.i.+ps have been wrecked. The Russians are on an unknown island. Day dawn, December 8, lying half buried in the sand, Bering breathes his last. On rafts made of wreckage the remnant of his crew find way back to Asia, but they have discovered a trail across the sea to a new land. Fur hunters are moving from the east, westward.

Fur hunters are moving from the west, eastward. These two tides will meet and clash at a later era.

The Treaty of Utrecht had stopped open war, but that did not prevent the bushrovers from raiding the border lands of Maine, of Ma.s.sachusetts, of New York. The story of one raid is the story of all, and several have already been related. Now comes a half century of petty war that raged on the border lands from Saratoga and Northfield to Maine and New Brunswick. The story of these "little wars," as the French called them, belongs more to the history of the United States than Canada.

Nor did the Peace of Utrecht stop the double dealing and intrigue by which European rulers sought to use bigoted missionaries and ignorant Indians as p.a.w.ns in the game of statecraft.

"Sentiments of opposition to the English in Acadia must be secretly fostered," commanded the King of France in 1715, two years after Acadia had been deeded over to England. "The King is pleased with the efforts of Pere Rasle to induce the Indians not to allow the English to settle on their lands," runs the royal dispatch of 1721 regarding the border ma.s.sacres of Maine. "Advise the missionaries in Acadia to do nothing that may serve as a pretext for sending them out of the country, but have them induce the Indians to organize enterprises against the English," command the royal instructions of 1744. "The Indians,"

writes the Canadian Governor, "can be depended on to bring in the scalps of the English as long as we furnish ammunition. This is the opinion of the missionary, M. Le Loutre." Again, from the Governor of New France: "If the settlers of {214} Acadia hesitate to rise against their English masters, we can employ threats of the Indians and force.

It is inconceivable that the English would try to remove these people.

Letters from M. Le Loutre report that his Indians have intercepted dispatches of the English officers. M. Le Loutre will keep us informed of everything in Acadia. We have furnished him with secret signals to our s.h.i.+ps, which will tell us of every movement on the part of the enemy."

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 dest.i.tute 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 impa.s.sable 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 pa.s.sed. 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 fis.h.i.+ng towns set Ma.s.sachusetts 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 s.h.i.+ps--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 sh.o.r.e 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 downsh.o.r.e 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 insh.o.r.e 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 ash.o.r.e. By nightfall the most of the English have landed, and spies report the harbor of Louisburg alive with torches where the French are sinking s.h.i.+ps to obstruct the entrance and setting fire to fis.h.i.+ng stages that might interfere with cannon aim. The next night, May 1, Vaughan's New Hamps.h.i.+re 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 s.h.i.+ps' 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 sh.e.l.l into the very heart of the fort.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM PEPPERRELL]

The next thing for the English was to get their heavy guns ash.o.r.e 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 ash.o.r.e; 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 alongsh.o.r.e, 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 s.h.i.+ps fled. The French s.h.i.+p 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 m.u.f.fled oars, but a wind rose, setting a tremendous surf las.h.i.+ng the rocks, and yet the invaders might have succeeded but for a piece of rashness. A hundred men had gained the sh.o.r.e 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 ash.o.r.e 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 a.s.sault, 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 a.s.saulted 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 s.h.i.+p anch.o.r.ed 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 s.h.i.+ps 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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' friends.h.i.+p. Also, as French traders pa.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 c.u.mberlands, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOVERNOR DINWIDDIE OF VIRGINIA]

By January of 1754 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 slas.h.i.+ng through the forest black as pitch, Was.h.i.+ngton 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. Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton as spies.

Expecting instant retaliation from Fort Duquesne, Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton.

July 3, towards midday, they burst from the woods whooping and yelling.

Was.h.i.+ngton 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, Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton's troops.

Terms of honorable surrender were granted, and the next day--the day which Was.h.i.+ngton 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 s.h.i.+ps. Coasting off Newfoundland, the English encounter three of the French s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: t.i.tLE-PAGE OF WAs.h.i.+NGTON'S JOURNAL]

Braddock himself, accompanied by Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 bl.u.s.tering 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 r.e.t.a.r.ded 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A SKETCH OF THE FIELD OF BATTLE AT BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT]

What happened has been told times without number in story and history.