King William's War Page 15
With the preparations in place, the expedition bound for Albany left Montreal in late January 1690. It consisted of 96 mission Indians and Algonquin and 114 Frenchmen. The majority of the Frenchmen were coureurs de bois, woodsmen, and bushfighters, all well versed in the forest arts and the tenets of Indian warfare. These skilled individualists made excellent partisans but, like their native brethren, were notoriously difficult to control. Fortunately for the detachment, the expedition was under the command of two experienced leaders, Le Moyne de St. Helene and D’Ailleboust de Mantet. Both men were well-known Canadian adventurers. Mantet had served for years in Great Lake posts and had recently been involved in the destruction of an Iroquois raiding party on the Lake of Two Mountains. St. Helene had made a name for himself during the capture of the English trading posts along Hudson Bay a few years before and was the son of the famous Charles Le Moyne, who had led his “Blue Coats” along the same path a generation before with Courcelle and Tracy.8
Several days out from Montreal, a council of war was held. Frontenac had left the choice of targets and the actual route to the discretion of St. Helene with the only proviso that the detachments not run any extraordinary risk in attempting to fulfill its mission. Up until now most of the French and Indians were unaware of the exact point of attack. St. Helene and Mantet informed all involved that it was their goal to attack Albany. Many of the natives were aghast at the announcement. The party appeared too small for such an undertaking. “Since when had the French become so desperate?” one of the natives inquired. St. Helene responded to the question by stating that it was their intention to restore the honor of French arms and that they would take Albany or die trying. The Indians, more familiar with the hardships that lay ahead, grunted at such talk. French honor or not, they were not interested in attacking Albany. Some time was spent trying to convince them otherwise but to no avail. For the moment the only thing agreed upon was to delay the decision.
For a little over a week the detachment navigated the frozen surfaces of Lake Champlain and Lake George, camping in the tree line at night. No fires were allowed, so the men huddled together in half-frozen clusters with a few blankets separating them from the clutches of winter. A few days out, a thaw turned the frozen landscape to a treacherous mix of broken ice, muddy water, and slush. When the path they were following diverged, the party turned right for Schenectady without uttering a word. Continuing on to Albany was out of the question. When they stopped to rest a few miles from Schenectady, it was not even clear whether they could continue on to that place. Frostbite and fatigue were taking their toll. Everyone was benumbed by the cold. It was late afternoon, and as the sun began to set, a series of windblown flurries filtered down from the dull gray skies. Strung out in small clumps along the barren crest of a ridge, most would have surrendered right then and there if an English patrol had appeared.
An hour later several scouts returned with news that they had captured a small wigwam not far away occupied by four women. The detachment moved forward to the Indian lodging. The men took turns warming themselves by the hut’s fire while scouts were dispatched toward the village and the women interrogated. The leader of the mission Indians, a Mohawk chief known as the Great Mohawk, or Kryn, carried himself through the troops, calling upon his dejected comrades to ignore their hardships and shake off their fatigue. Now was the time to wash away the wrongs done to them in English blood, he called out. There were nods and murmurs of approval, and with their morale partially restored by the words and few minutes fireside, the force pushed forward. The scouts, led by a Canadian named Giguieres, rejoined the main body a few miles from the town. Giguieres informed St. Helene and Mantet that he and his party had been within a gunshot of the town and had seen no one. It was welcome news, and the detachment moved forward guided by the captured women. Around 11:00 p.m. the outline of Schenectady appeared through the swirling snow. The original plan was to wait until two o’clock before launching the attack, but the weather had turned so severe that it was deemed impossible to wait.
The village was enclosed by an oblong palisade with gates at its north and south ends. St. Helene sent his brother Iberville with a small force to secure the south or Albany gate, but amidst the darkened flurries and unfamiliar surroundings, it could not be located. Iberville returned to find that his brother and Mantet had discovered the northern gate, which, to the surprise of all, was wide open. The only sentries seen were a pair of snowmen that flanked the entrance, the real ones having apparently retired from the cold hours before. St. Helene and Mantet quickly formed their forces into two columns and quietly led them through the northern gate. Once through, St. Helene’s column moved to the right while Mantet and his men circled left. The two columns strung themselves along the inner palisade walls until they joined hands at the south gate. With this, the town was completely encircled and its sleeping inhabitants doomed.
Two hundred and ten war whoops broke the silence as the French and their Indian allies burst upon the settlement. St. Helene led a detachment toward a blockhouse manned by a handful of Connecticut militia. Under the leadership of their lieutenant, these troops fired on their assailants from the loopholes cut in the walls but to little avail. The numbers were too great and the attack too sudden. At length the French broke down the blockhouse doors and put the tiny garrison to the sword before setting the entire structure ablaze. Within the town itself the massacre raged. Many of the inhabitants awoke only to see a glimpse of a falling tomahawk or the flash of a musket. Others were dragged from their homes and slain on the snow-covered streets that crisscrossed the village, and still others perished in the flames that began to take hold of the town. Occasionally a home resisted. The Marquis de Montigny attempted to enter one dwelling and was wounded by a spear-wielding inhabitant after his musket misfired. St. Helene was nearby and stormed the building with several men, killing all of the defenders as Montigny was dragged away to safety.
A few escaped through the Albany gate in the confusion, but most found themselves victims of the French and Indian wrath. The town minister Peter Tassemaker was to be spared in hopes that he might provide valuable information to the attackers, but the order was useless in the face of such a frenzy. Tassemaker was hacked down without a thought and his home set ablaze before anyone realized what had happened. The hardship of the march and the memories of La Chine and La Chesnaye fueled the attackers’ efforts. For two full hours the carnage reigned. When it was finally spent, sixty villagers lay dead and, with the exception of a lucky handful, the remainder of the inhabitants, numbering almost one hundred, found themselves prisoners. Thirty Mohawk were discovered within the village. When they inquired as to their fate St. Helene informed them that it was the English with whom the French had a quarrel, not the Mohawk, and as such, they were free to do as they pleased.9
The remainder of the night was spent securing the village and tending to the handful of wounded. At daybreak a detachment under the command of Iberville and the Great Mohawk was sent across the river to the home of the town’s chief magistrate, John Sanders Glen. Glen and his servants had fortified his home and were prepared to defend themselves to the end, but Iberville had specific orders that Glen, his family, and his property were not to be harmed. The magistrate had helped secure the release of several French prisoners in the past and thus had been singled out for special consideration. After some negotiations, Glen agreed to accompany Iberville back to the village to meet with St. Helene and Mantet. When he arrived, the French commander informed him that his property had not been harmed. He then led him before the captured mass and told him to identify his kin so they might be spared. Glen gazed upon the desperate faces before him and pointed to individual after individual until the natives that had accompanied St. Helene finally began to object, claiming that he was related to everyone.
With this task completed, St. Helene ordered all the dwellings within the village set to the torch. Only half a dozen homes were spared. One belonged to Glen and another held th
e French wounded. The remaining structures were spared by Glen’s intervention. In all, some eighty homes were consumed. A blackened pall clutched the village as the French loaded their wounded and plunder onto sleds. Fifty horses were taken to haul the loot and provide food for the return trip. Of the prisoners, twenty-seven men and boys were selected to return to Canada. The rest, old men, women, and children, were spared at the insistence of Glen and the urging of the Mohawk who had begun taking up his cause.10
By noon the French were gone and Schenectady was in ashes. In many respects the attack was misplaced. The town was predominantly Dutch and had shown great sympathy toward French captives in the past. It was not a trading post like Albany, where the Iroquois received their weapons and encouragement to attack the French. It was a frontier hamlet struggling to survive against the hardships and perils of colonial life. But, then again, so were La Chine and La Chesnaye.
By five o’clock news of the attack had reached Albany, and the fort’s cannon were fired to signal the alarm to the surrounding inhabitants. Letters were dispatched to Esopus and Kinderhook, and several Mohawk in Albany agreed to go warn the nearby Mohawk villages. The weather was so poor that it was hours, or even days, before the letters reached their destinations, and the Mohawk were so terrified after viewing the destruction at Schenectady that they refused to go any farther.11
On February 12, a makeshift force of Mohawk and English assembled outside of Schenectady and set out after the retreating French. Equipped with their captured horses and possessing a week’s head start, it appeared the French would make good their escape. Around Crown Point the Englishmen abandoned the chase, but the Mohawk doggedly pressed on. Near Montreal they finally caught sight of their quarry. The French, exhausted from their trek and low on provisions, had separated into several detachments, each shuffling on toward Montreal at their best pace. A score of Mohawk fell upon a pair of straggling groups and, after a brief fight, killed or captured eighteen of their number.12
The last minute loss dampened the spirits of the French, but in all, the mission was treated as an unheralded success. The English had finally been chastised for their meddling with the Iroquois, and as for the latter, a clear message had been sent that there was no sanctuary to be found in their allies. New York mobilized and word began to spread through the colonies of the French and Indian depredations. In New England concern would turn to panic as the last two of Frontenac’s war parties descended onto the Maine and New Hampshire frontier.
The second of Frontenac’s three war parties was commanded by forty-seven-year-old Joseph-François Hertel de la Fresnière. A native of Three Rivers and a veteran of the Iroquois conflicts, Hertel served in the defense of his hometown on numerous occasions. In 1661 he was taken captive and spent two years among the Iroquois, learning their customs and their ways before escaping and returning to Three Rivers. He served in both Courcelle’s and Tracy’s expeditions against the Mohawk and later was entrusted with command of all of New France’s native allies by both Governors La Barre and Denonville. A respected partisan leader, his exploits and tactics earned him the nickname “the Hero,” from his contemporaries.
Hertel’s force would consist of some fifty-two men, approximately half Canadians including his three eldest sons and his nephew. The rest were natives under the command of the Abenaki war chief Hopehood.13 The plan was for this force to depart from Three Rivers and, after a trek of some 250 miles, fall upon the settlement of Salmon Falls (Rollinsford), Maine. Hertel departed Three Rivers in late January 1690, and after a grueling two-month march through the Vermont and New Hampshire wilderness during the height of winter, the detachment arrived outside Salmon Falls on the evening of March 27. Wasting no time the war party struck early the next morning. The surprise was near total. The town had failed to post a watch, and most of the inhabitants were still in bed when their attackers started breaking down doors. The town’s fort was quickly seized, and before any organized defense could be mounted it was over. Forty-three of the town’s inhabitants fell before the onslaught while another fifty-four were taken prisoner. With the town safely in his hands, Hertel ordered the fort and the surrounding homes to be put to the torch and the livestock killed.
With his prisoners in tow, Hertel moved off to the north. Around sunset scouts returned with news of a one-hundred-man English force in pursuit. Hertel crossed the Wooster (Worster) River and arranged his men in an ambush along the wooded north bank near a small bridge. When the English detachment, a hastily thrown together force from the militia of nearby towns, approached the bridge Hertel ordered his men to fire. With darkness descending a brief firefight commenced that “lasted as long as they could see friends from Enemies.” Hertel departed not long after dark, and the English detachment, which had suffered a dozen casualties in the sharp encounter, showed no interest in pursuing.
Within a few days Hertel arrived at a friendly Eastern Abenaki village. Here he heard news that Frontenac’s third war party, led by Rene Robinau de Portneuf, had just passed through the village a few days before. Although his mission had been accomplished Hertel sent his prisoners back to Quebec under a small escort and, with thirty-six volunteers, marched to join Portneuf.
Portneuf, who was a lieutenant stationed in Acadia, had the most difficult of the three tasks. Leaving from Quebec in late January his force of fifty Frenchmen and sixty Abenaki from the St. Francois Mission was to negotiate its way through the frozen wilds of northern Maine and, after rendezvousing with Wabanaki forces raised by Castin, attack Falmouth, Maine. On May 25, after a punishing three-and-a-half-month journey Portneuf’s detachment arrived at a Wabanaki village a dozen miles from his intended target. Here he was delighted to meet Hertel and hear news of the partisan’s successful attack on Salmon Falls. In addition, Castin and one hundred Wabanaki reinforcements were present as well, having descended the Kennebec River a few days before. The prospects for success looked good. In all, the entire force, after recruiting volunteers from the local tribes, was some four hundred in number and the garrison of Fort Loyal was known to be weak.
The defenses of Falmouth centered about Fort Loyal. Located upon a hill overlooking the harbor and the outlet of the Casco River into Casco Bay, the fort was a simple wooden palisade structure with loopholes cut in the walls for musketry and eight cannon mounted upon the four bastions that linked the curtain walls. The garrison consisted of a captain and sixty men, but this was augmented in the fall of 1689 by two companies under Captains Sylvanus Davis and Simon Willard, who occupied the stronghold with one hundred men. To supplement the fort there were four garrison houses in Falmouth, one of which, Lawrence’s, was made of stone and located atop Munjoy Hill.
Portneuf and his force descended the river system to Casco Bay and made camp on one of the islands while they waited for their scouts to return with news of Falmouth’s defenses. The next afternoon a number of Wabanaki ambushed and killed a settler near the fort, which sent an alarm through the town. Now discovered, Portneuf moved his troops under the cover of darkness to Indian Cove, located at the tip of Falmouth Neck, where the wooded elevations of Munjoy Hill concealed his forces throughout the night. The next morning as the French and Indian war party crept forward toward the top of Munjoy Hill they were discovered by the watch at Lawrence’s blockhouse.
Unfortunately for Captain Davis, Willard and a number of his men had departed a few days before, but undaunted, the captain organized a sortie to go out and meet what Davis assumed was a small raiding party. A thirty-man detachment under the command of Lt. Thaddeus Clark marched out of Fort Loyal around noon and in proper column formation proceeded to the foot of Munjoy Hill. From here the road was fenced in on both sides and narrowed to little more than a wagon trail as it wound its way up the hill to Lawrence’s garrison house. It was a perfect trap, and Clark, true to his orders, marched straight into it. About halfway up the hill the sounds of marching and rustling equipment was shattered by the crash of musketry, first from one side of the road and then
the other. The shock collapsed the English column, and as the echoes of the last shots died out a thunderous war whoop came forth before the French and their allies charged with sword and tomahawk. It was not a matter of resistance for Clark’s men but escape. In a running battle back to Fort Loyal only five of the original party made it safely through the stronghold’s gates and all of these men were wounded. The retort of the fort’s cannon dissuaded any thought the French might have of surprising the fort, and a pair of attackers fell victim to these guns when they advanced too far.
Portneuf moved forward to invest Lawrence’s blockhouse while his advance guard scouted the town and the fort. The French commander pulled his forces back that evening, and the occupants of garrison houses in Falmouth used the opportunity to evacuate to Fort Loyal. By morning over two hundred inhabitants had found refuge behind the fort’s wooden walls. Although safe for the moment, for Davis and his charges it was not good news. The enemy looked much stronger than first thought, perhaps several hundred in all, while within the walls of the fort the captain could call upon perhaps seventy fighting men. Davis’s supplies were limited, both in munitions and foodstuffs, the latter of which would be quickly consumed with the numbers now within the fort. To make matters worse, there was little hope that a relief force could reach them in time. The French commander had summoned the fort to surrender, but Davis informed him “that they would defend themselves to the death.”
With the element of surprise lost Portneuf cautiously moved forward the next day to invest Fort Loyal. If Davis’s difficulties in defending the fort seemed daunting, so too were Portneuf’s options at this point. Frontenac had directed him to avoid attacking fortifications for fear of excessive losses, but at the moment this was the only path open to him and in his estimation was a risk worth taking. The town was abandoned, and the raiders quickly occupied the houses close to the fort, sniping at its occupants while their comrades put the buildings to the torch. A black column of smoke rose from Falmouth Neck as Portneuf paused for the evening. The town was destroyed and the fort invested, but after skirmishing with its garrison during the day it was clear that it could not betaken by storm without suffering heavy casualties. As such it became a question of what to do next. It seems clear that Portneuf or one of the other partisan commanders understood the elements of siege craft. It was agreed to take advantage on a bluff some fifty paces from the fort that offered protection from cannon fire and musketry and open a trench toward the fort’s waterside wall. Once at the wall they could burn the fort or blow a breach in the wall. While half his force probed and sniped at the fort’s defenders, the rest of Portneuf’s detachment made good progress on their siege trench using captured tools.