Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1756 to 1763, part 1

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 Pré 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 Lévis, 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 ,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.

And though the country is on verge of ruin, though poor people of the three towns are rioting in the streets for food, old women cursing the little wizened Intendant with his pimpled face as he rolls past resplendent in carriage with horses whose harness is a blaze of silver, the troops threatening to mutiny because they are compelled to use horse flesh,--though New France is hovering over a volcano of disaster, they dance to their death, thoughtless as butterflies, gay as children, these manikin imitators of the French court, who are ruining New France that they may copy the vices of an Old World playing at kingcraft.

The regular troops are uniformed in white with facings of blue and red and gold and violet, three-cornered hat, and leather leggings to knee.

What with chapel bells ringing and ringing, and bugle {245} call and counter call echoing back from Cape Diamond; what with Monsieur Bigot's prancing horses and Madame Péan's flashy carriage,--Madame Péan of whom Bigot is so enamored he has sent her husband to some far western post and passes each evening at her gay receptions,--what with the grounding of the sentry's arms and the parade of troops, Quebec is a gay place these years of black ruin, and the gossips have all they can do to keep track of the amours and the duels and the high personages cultivating Madame Péan; for cultivated she must be by all who covet place or power.

A word from Madame Péan to Bigot is of more value than a bribe.

Even Montcalm and De Lévis attend her revels.

[Illustration: RUINS OF CHÂTEAU BIGOT] Twenty people sup with Monsieur Bigot each night, either at the Intendant's palace down by Charles River, or nine miles out towards Beauport, where he has built himself the Forest Hermitage, now known as Château Bigot,--a magnificent country manor house of red brick, hidden away among the hills with the gay shrubberies of French gardens set down in an American wilderness.

Supper over by seven, the guests sit down to play, and the amount a man may gamble is his social barometer, whether {246} he lose or win, cheat or steal.

If dancing follows gambling, the rout will not disperse till seven in the morning.

What time is left of the twenty-four hours in a day will be devoted to public affairs.

Montcalm's salary is only 25,000 francs, or ,000. To maintain the dignity of the King, the commander in chief must keep the pace, and he too gives weekly suppers, with places set for forty people, "whom I don't know," he writes dejectedly to his wife, "and don't want to know;

and wish that I might spend the evenings quietly in my own chamber."

To Montcalm, who was of noble birth with no shamming, this lowbred pretense and play at courtcraft became a bore; to his staff of officers, a source of continual amusement; but De Lévis presently falls victim to a pair of fine eyes possessed by the wife of another man.

War filled the summers, but the winters were given up to social life;

and of all midwinter social gayeties the most important was the official visit of the Governor and the Intendant to Montreal.

By this time a good road had been cut from Quebec to Montreal along the north shore, and the sleighs usually set out in January or February.

Bigot added to the occasion all the prestige of a social rout.

All the grand dames and cavaliers of Quebec were invited.

Baggage was sent on ahead with servants to break the way, find quarters for the night, and prepare meals.

After a dinner at the Intendant's palace the sleighs set out, two horses to each, driven tandem because the sleigh road was too narrow for a team.

Each sleigh held only two occupants, and to the damage done by fair eyes was added the glow of exhilaration from driving behind spirited horses in frosty air with the bells of a hundred carryalls ringing across the snow.

At seven was pause for supper.

High play followed till ten.

Then early to bed and early to rise and on the road again by seven in the morning!

In Montreal was one continual round of dinners and dances.

Between times, appointments were made to the military posts and trading stations of the Up-Country.

He who wanted a good post must pay his court to Madame Péan.

No wonder Montcalm breathed a sigh of relief when Lent put a stop to the gayeties and he could quietly pass his evenings with the Sulpician priests.

{247} To break from Bigot's ring during the war was impossible.

Creatures of his choosing filled the army, handled the supplies, controlled the Indians; and when the King's reproof became too sharp, Bigot simply threatened to resign, which wrought consternation, for no man of ability would attempt to unwind the tangle of Bigot's dishonesty during a critical war.

Montcalm wrote home complaints in cipher.

The French government bided its time, and Bigot tightened his vampire suckers on the lifeblood of the dying nation.

The whole era is a theme for the allegory of artist or poet.

[Illustration: PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS, OTTAWA] [Illustration: QUEBEC, CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC AND THE CITADEL] Montcalm had arrived in May of 1756. By midsummer he was leading three thousand French artillerymen across Lake Ontario from Fort Frontenac (Kingston), to attack the English post on the south side, Oswego.

Inside the fort walls were seven hundred raw English provincials, ill of scurvy from lack of food.

The result need scarcely be told.

Seven hundred ill men behind wooden walls had no chance against three thousand soldiers in health with heavy artillery.

To take the English by surprise, Montcalm had crossed the lake on August 4 by night.

Two days later all the transport ships had landed the troops and the cannon had actually been mounted before the English knew of the enemy's presence.

On the east side of the river was Fort Ontario, a barricade of logs built in the shape of a star, housing an outguard of three hundred and seventy men.

On discovering the French, the sentry spiked their cannon, threw their powder in the river, and retired at midnight inside Oswego's walls.

Working like beavers, Montcalm's men dragged twenty cannon to a hill commanding the fort, known as "Fort Rascal" because the outfort there was useless to the English.

Before Montcalm's cannonade Oswego's walls, plastered with clay and rubble, fell like the staves of a dry barrel.

The English sharpshooters then hid behind pork barrels placed in three tiers filled with sand; but Colonel Mercer, their officer, was literally cut in two by a cannon shot, and the women, cooped up inside the barracks, begged the officers to avoid Indian massacre by surrender.

{248} A white flag was waved.

Including women, something under a thousand English surrendered themselves prisoners to Montcalm.

The Indians fell at once to mad plunder.

Spite of the terms of honorable surrender, the English were stripped of everything, and only Montcalm's promise of ,000 worth of presents to the savages prevented butchery.

The victors decamped to Montreal, well pleased with the campaign of 1756. It need not be told that there were constant raids and counter raids along the frontier during the entire year.

Loudon, the English commander, did not arrive in New York till well on in midsummer of 1756, and he found far different material from the trained bushfighters in the hands of Montcalm.

The English soldiers were raw provincial recruits, dressed, at best, in buckskin, but for the most part in the rough homespun which they had worn when they had left plow and carpenter's bench and fishing boat.

While Montcalm was capturing Oswego, Loudon was licking his rough recruits into shape, "making men out of mud" for the campaign of 1757. Indeed, it was said of Loudon, and the saying stuck to him as characteristic of his campaign, that he resembled the wooden horse figure of a tavern sign,--always on horseback but never rode forward.

Instead of striking at Lake Champlain or on the Ohio, where the French were aggressors, Loudon planned to repeat the brilliant capture of Louisburg.

July of 1857 found him at Halifax planting vegetable gardens to prevent scurvy,--"the cabbage campaign" it was derisively called,--and waiting for Gorham's rangers to reconnoiter Louisburg.

Gorham's scouts brought back word that the French admiral had come in with twenty-four men-of-war and seven thousand men.

To overpower such strength meant a prolonged siege.

It was already August.

Loudon sailed back to New York without firing a gun, while the English fleet, trying to reconnoiter Louisburg, suffered terrible shipwreck.

[Illustration: THE EARL OF LOUDON] Montcalm was not the enemy to let the chance of Loudon's absence from the scene of action pass unimproved.

While Loudon is pottering at Halifax, Montcalm marshals his troops to the {249} number of eight thousand, including one thousand Indians at Carillon or Ticonderoga, where Lake George empties into Lake Champlain.

Portaging two hundred and fifty flatboats with as many birch canoes up the river, the French invade the mountain wilderness of Lake George.

Towards the end of July, Lévis leads part of the troops by land up the west shore towards the English post of Fort William Henry.

Montcalm advances on the lake with the flatboats and canoes, and the rafts with the heavy artillery.

Each night Lévis' troops kindle their signal fires on the mountain slope, and each night Montcalm from the lake signals back with torches.

It needs artist's brush to paint the picture: the forested mountains green and lonely and silent in the shimmering sunlight of the summer sky; the lake gold as molten metal in the fire of the setting sun; the soldiers in their gay uniforms of white and blue, hoisting tent cloths on oar sweeps for sails as a breeze dimples the waters; the French voyageurs clad in beaded buckskin chanting some ditty of Old-World fame to the rhythmic dip of the Indian paddles; the Indians naked, painted for war, with a glitter in their eyes of a sinister intent which they have no mind to tell Montcalm; and then, at the south of Lake George, nestling between the hills and the water, the little palisaded fort,--Fort William Henry,--with gates fast shut and two thousand bushfighters behind the walls, weak from an epidemic of smallpox, and, as usual, so short of provisions that siege means starvation.