The Project Gutenberg eBook, Quaint and Historic Forts of North America , by John Martin Hammond

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QUAINT AND HISTORIC FORTS OF NORTH AMERICA

COLONIAL MANSIONS
OF MARYLAND AND
DELAWARE

BY JOHN MARTIN HAMMOND

With sixty-five illustrations from original photographs. Large octavo. Handsomely bound in cloth. Gilt top. In a box. A Limited Edition, printed from type which has been distributed. $5.00 net.

The Outlook, N. Y. C.

“A book of elegance in form,
illustration, and subject.”

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

Publishers Philadelphia

By courtesy of the St. Augustine Historical Society

THE ANCIENT WATCH-TOWER OF FORT MARION, ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA

QUAINT AND HISTORIC
FORTS OF
NORTH AMERICA

BY

JOHN MARTIN HAMMOND

AUTHOR OF
“COLONIAL MANSIONS OF MARYLAND AND DELAWARE”

WITH SEVENTY-ONE ILLUSTRATIONS

J. B LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
PHILADELPHIA & LONDON
1915

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER, 1915

PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS
PHILADELPHIA, U. S. A.

PREFACE

An account of the most famous fortifications of North America is, in reality, a cross section of the military history of the continent; and whatever ingenuity there may be in this method of presenting the conspicuous deeds of valor of the American people will, it may be hoped, add interest to the following pages.

So many races of men have wrestled for the North American continent in, historically speaking, so brief a space of time! We behold the Indian in possession though we do not know who was his predecessor in holding the land, though the mounds of the Middle West, notably Illinois and Arkansas, point to a race of a higher culture and more developed knowledge of building than the red men had. There come the Spanish with their relentless persecutions of the natives. There come the English, French, Dutch, Swedish. And the claims of each clash, to at length give way—despite the military acumen of the French—to the steady, home-building genius of the English.

Of the strongholds which the Spanish built to maintain their title to this part of the world there remain such substantial relics as the old fort at St. Augustine, annually visited by thousands of people, and that at Pensacola, Florida. The French are best remembered by their works at Quebec. Of the defensive works of the Dutch, on the Hudson, or the Swedes, on the Delaware, nothing remains. The English were not great builders of forts; they were essentially tillers of the soil. The most important English military work of early Colonial days in America was Castle William (Fort Independence), Boston harbor.

To the French with their restless explorers and indefatigable missionaries to the Indians must be ascribed the credit of most completely grasping the physical conditions of the North American continent and of formulating the most comprehensive scheme for military defense of their holdings. The French forts extended in a well-organized line from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence west and south through the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. They originated and executed, all things considered, the most daring and comprehensive military project ever conceived on the continent of North America.

In the preparation of this work it has given me great pleasure and has clarified to a marked degree my conceptions of the larger movements of American history,—especially in regard to the topographical considerations governing these movements,—to have visited the seats of early empire in this country and the various centres of military renown in its later days. All of the places described in this book are worth a visit by the sight-seer as well as the historian—that is, they contain visible monuments of the Past. I have, myself, taken the greater number of photographs which illustrate the volume. Others have been donated or purchased, as the credit lines will tell.

It is, perhaps, as well to state that this work has been done with the knowledge of the War Department of the United States, which has very kindly allowed me to reproduce some of the pictures in its archives and has greatly helped me with my researches in its public records. When I have visited those few points of historic significance still occupied by the army I have been very courteously shown all points of interest not of present military value and have been allowed to photograph scenes which I desired to record which would have no worth to an enemy of the country.

In carrying forward my work I have freely consulted historical authorities, among which I would like especially to acknowledge indebtedness to the writings of Francis Parkman, who in his many volumes has made the days of Old France in the New World a living reality; to John Fiske, “New France and New England;” to Reuben G. Thwaites, “France in America;” to various publications of the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society; to Agnes C. Laut, “Canada;” to William Henry Withrow, “Canada;” to Randall Parrish, “Historic Illinois;” to the Hon. Peter A. Porter, “Brief History of Old Fort Niagara;” to Benson John Lossing, “Pictorial Field Book of the Revolution;” to E. G. Bourne, “Spain in America;” to Charles B. Reynolds, “Old St. Augustine;” to Loyall Farragut, “David Glasgow Farragut;” and to various books of travel and reminiscence, among which I would like to mention: S. A. Drake, “Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast” and “The Pine Tree Coast;” George Champlin Mason, “Reminiscences of Newport;” Irene A. Wright, “Cuba;” A. Hyatt Verrill, “Cuba;” Helen Throop Purdy, “San Francisco;” Ernest Peixotto, “Romantic California;” Adelaide Wilson, “Savannah, Picturesque and Beautiful;” Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel, “Charleston, the Place and the People;” and I have received valuable help in material and suggestions from various State historical societies, which have been uniformly courteous and desirous to be of service.

I wish to express gratitude to various friends and individuals who have helped me with suggestions or photographs, among whom I may mention Messrs. Henry P. Baily, Lloyd Norris, William H. Castle, Edward P. Crummer, Maurice T. Fleisher, James Prescott Martin, Edward H. Smith, and Harold Donaldson Eberlein.

September, 1915.

J. M. H.

[CONTENTS]

ILLUSTRATIONS

QUAINT AND HISTORIC FORTS
OF NORTH AMERICA

[STRONGHOLDS OF THE PAST]

The tourist on the coast of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia—for in summer hundreds of people seek out this pleasant land for its cheerful climate—may come upon a little bay on the easternmost verge of the land where is a deep land-locked inlet protected from elemental fury by a long rocky arm thrust out from the shore into the sea. He will not be able to surmise from the present aspect of his surroundings that this was the site of mighty Louisburg, the greatest artificial stronghold (Quebec being largely a work of nature) that the French ever had in the New World. Of this massive and menacing fortress, which cost thirty million livres and twenty-five years of toil to build after the designs of the great Vauban, hardly one stone lies placed upon another and grass and rubble have taken the place of the heavy walls. Standing on the ground where New France’s greatest leaders stood it is difficult to-day to picture the martial pomp which once must have claimed this spot, to visualize, more particularly, the setting for the farcical onslaught of the zealous New Englanders of 1744, under the doughty Pepperell, in their greatest single military exploit.

The Treaty of Utrecht, which provided a basis of agreement for France and England in the New World for almost half a century, did not establish boundaries between the two countries and the contest to determine the question was unceasing, though not officially recognized. France busied herself in building fortifications and was ready frequently to formally draw the sword; yet it needed the outbreak of the War of The Austrian Succession in 1744, in far distant Europe, to precipitate the American quarrel.

The news of the beginning of this conflict came to Duquesnel, commandant of Louisburg, before it reached the English colonies, however, and it seemed to him an essentially proper thing to do to strike against the English. He accordingly sent out an expedition against the English fishing village of Canseau, at the southern end of the Strait of Canseau, which separates Cape Breton Island from the peninsula of Acadia. With a wooden redoubt defended by eighty Englishmen anticipating no danger, Canseau offered no great resistance and was easily taken, its inhabitants sent to Boston, and its houses burned to the ground. The next blow was an unsuccessful expedition against Annapolis Royal. By these two valueless strokes Duquesnel warned New England that New France was on the aggressive.

To sea from the ruined walls [top]
All that remains standing
MIGHTY LOUISBURG TO-DAY, CAPE BRETON, NOVA SCOTIA

Enraged by the attacks upon Canseau and Annapolis and with the easy self-confidence which is a heritage of the children of the hardy north Atlantic coast, the people of Massachusetts were prepared for the suggestion of William Vaughan, of Damariscotta, that with their untrained militia they should attack New France’s mightiest stronghold. Vaughan found a willing listener in the governor, William Shirley, who helped the enterprise on its way.

The originator of this astounding project was born at Portsmouth, in 1703, and was a graduate of Harvard College nineteen years thereafter. His father had been lieutenant-governor of New Hampshire. Soon after leaving college Vaughan had betrayed an adventurous disposition by establishing a fishing-station on the island of Matinicus off the coast of Maine. Afterward he became the owner of most of the land on the little river Damariscotta where he built a little wooden fort, established a considerable settlement and built up an extensive trade in fish and timber. Governor Shirley was an English barrister who had come to Massachusetts in 1731 to practise his profession and who had been raised by his own native gifts to the position of highest eminence in the colony.

On the 9th of January, 1745, the General Court of Massachusetts received a message from the governor that he had a communication to make to them so critical that he must swear all of the members to secrecy. Then to their astonishment he proposed that they undertake the reduction of Louisburg. They listened with respect to the governor’s suggestion and appointed a committee of two to consider the matter. The committee’s report, made in the course of several days, was unfavorable and so was the vote of the court.

Meanwhile intelligence of Governor Shirley’s proposal had leaked out despite the pledge of secrecy. It is said that a country member of the court more pious than discreet was overheard praying long and fervently for Divine guidance in the matter. The news flew through the province and public pressure compelled a reconsideration of the project. It was urged against the plan that raw militia were no match for disciplined troops behind ramparts, that the expense would be staggering and that the credit of the colony was already overstrained. The matter was put to a vote and carried by a single vote. This result is said to have been due to one of the opposition falling and breaking his leg while hurrying to the council.

The die was now cast and hesitation vanished. Shirley wrote to all of the colonies as far south as Pennsylvania, but of these only four responded: Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, which blazed with holy zeal as, since the enterprise would be directed against Roman Catholics, it was supposed that heaven would in a peculiar manner favor it. There were prayers in churches and families. New Hampshire provided 500 men, of which number Massachusetts was to pay and provide for 150; Rhode Island voted a sloop carrying fourteen cannon and twelve swivels; Connecticut promised 516 men and officers provided that Roger Wolcott should have second rank in the expedition; and Massachusetts was to provide 3000 men and the commanding officer.

This last condition was one of the hardest to fulfil, for, as Governor Wanton of Rhode Island wrote, there was not in New England “one officer of experience nor even an engineer.” The choice fell upon William Pepperell, of Kittery, Maine (then a part of Massachusetts), who though a prosperous trader had had little experience to fit him for commanding an attack upon a great fortress. Pepperell’s home is still standing at Kittery and is a substantial structure as befitted its affluent master.

There was staying at Pepperell’s house at this time the preacher Whitefield. Pepperell asked his guest for a motto for the expedition. “Nil Desperandum Christo Duce” was suggested; and this being adopted gave to the expedition the air of a crusade.

A novel plan was suggested, among others, to Pepperell by one of the zealots of New England. Two trustworthy men, according to this plan, were to be sent out at night before the French ramparts, one of them carrying a wooden mallet with which he was to beat upon the ground. The other was to place his ear to the ground and wherever a concealed mine would give back a hollow sound was to make a cross mark with chalk so that the New England boys would know where not to walk when they attacked the fort. The French sentry meanwhile, it was supposed, would be too confused by the unusual noise of the thumping to take any action.

Within seven weeks after Shirley issued his proclamation preparations for the expedition were complete. The force, all told, numbered about four thousand men. Transports were easily obtained in the harbor of Boston or in the towns adjoining. There was a lack of cannon of large calibre, but it was known that the French possessed cannon of large calibre, so cannon balls and supplies to fit such guns were carried along, it being foreseen that the army would capture sufficient of the French cannon to supply its needs. Of other supplies there was a sufficiency and, to overbalance the lack of any military training whatever in the officers, Governor Shirley had written a long list of instructions for the siege. These instructions, after going into such minute directions as how to make fast the windows of the Governor’s apartment at Louisburg, and outlining a complex series of military manœuvres to be undertaken after dark by men who had no idea of the country they would be in, ended with the words, “Notwithstanding the instructions you have received from me I must leave you to act, upon unforeseen emergencies, according to your best discretion.”

On Friday, April 5, 1745, the first of the transports arrived at Canseau, the rendezvous, about sixty miles from Louisburg, and this little post which had now a small French garrison changed hands again. Captain Ammi Cutter was put in command with sixty-eight men. On Sunday there was a great open-air concourse at which Parson Moody preached on the text “Thy people shall be willing in the day of Thy power.” Parson Moody’s sermon was disturbed by the drilling of an awkward squad whose men were learning how to handle a musket.

For three weeks the expedition lay at Canseau waiting for the ice to clear from the northern waters, and then, on the morning of the 29th, it set out expecting to make Louisburg by nine o’clock that evening and to take the French by surprise as Shirley had directed. The French, of course, had been aware all the time of the location of the enemy and had even had intelligence from Boston when the affair was first bruited about. A lull in the wind caused a change in the plan of taking the French by surprise and it was not until the keen light of the following morning that the New Englanders saw Louisburg, no very great sight at that, as the buildings of the town were almost completely hid behind the massive walls which encircled them.

And now how were matters going on inside the mighty walls? Badly, it must be admitted. The garrison consisted of five hundred and sixty regulars, of whom several companies were Swiss, and of about fourteen hundred militia. The regulars were in bad condition and had, indeed, the preceding Christmas, broken into mutiny because of exasperation with bad rations and with having been given no extra pay for work on the fortifications. Some of the officers had lost all confidence in their men and the commandant, Chevalier Duchambon, successor to Duquesnel, was a man of hesitant and capricious mind. It is thus to be seen that the fortress was fatally weak within though in material circumstances it was the strongest on the North American continent.

The landing of the provincial forces was accomplished creditably about three miles below the fortifications. Vaughan then led about four hundred men to the town and saluted it with three cheers, much to the discomfiture of the garrison, which was entirely unused to this kind of warfare. He then marched unresisted to the northeast arm of the harbor where there were magazines of naval stores. These his men set on fire and he the next day set about returning to the main force.

The strongest outlying work of Louisburg was the Grand Battery more than a mile from the town. As Vaughan came near this work he observed therein no signs of life. One of Vaughan’s party was a Cape Cod Indian. This red man was bribed by a flask of brandy which Vaughan had in his pocket to undertake a reconnoissance, which he carried through in a unique fashion. Pretending to be drunk, and waving his flask around his head, the Indian staggered toward the battery. There was still no life. The Indian entered through an embrasure and found the place empty. Vaughan took possession and an eighteen-year-old drummer boy climbed the flagstaff and fastened thereon a red shirt as a substitute for the British ensign. Thus also did the Massachusetts men acquire the cannon for which they had been hoping.

It is difficult to understand how it was that the Grand Battery was deserted. “A detachment of the enemy advanced to the neighborhood of the Royal Battery,” writes the Habitant de Louisburg in his invaluable narrative retailed by Parkman. “At once we were all seized with fright and on the instant it was proposed to abandon this magnificent battery which would have been our best defence, if one had known how to use it. Various councils were held in a tumultuous way. It would be hard to tell the reasons for such a strange proceeding. Not one shot had been fired at the battery, which the enemy could not take except by making regular approaches as if against the town itself, and by besieging it, so to speak, in form. Some persons remonstrated, but in vain; and so a battery which had cost the King immense sums was abandoned before it was attacked.”

The battery contained twenty-eight forty-two pounder cannon and two eighteen-pounders. Several of these guns were opened upon the town the next morning, “which,” wrote a soldier of New England in his diary, “damaged the houses and made the women cry.”

In this good-natured fashion did the whole siege progress. It is hardly possible to write about the informal procedure in an orderly fashion. Accomplishing incredible tasks in fashions opposed to all of the laws of warfare the New Englanders went on with only rudimentary observance of discipline under their merchant commander. While the cannon boomed in front the men behind the lines wrestled, and ran races, and fired at targets, though ammunition was short, and chased French cannon balls for exercise, bringing back the cannon balls to be used in the guns. Some of the men went fishing about two miles away. Now and then some of the fishermen lost their scalps to Indians who prowled about the camps of the besiegers.

At last the impossible happened. Discouraged by humiliating failures and badly, though not fatally, battered, mighty Louisburg surrendered. The strongest work of man in the New World had fallen to ignorant New England fishermen! The soldiers of France received the ridicule of the whole Old World and an effort was made from Versailles to recover the point lost, but unsuccessfully.

Louisburg was restored to the French Crown in 1748 by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. It was to fall again to English arms in the Seven Years War, which ended with the complete extinction of French power in the New World; but with the account of this siege, which was conducted painfully and formally in accord with the rules of war, we need have no concern. The great fortress was then destroyed block by block and Time has continued the work of demolition which the English began.

While Louisburg and Quebec were great eastern strongholds of the French in America, their centre of power in the far west was Fort Chartres on the Mississippi River, at the mouth of the Kaskaskia River, Illinois. Here they held gay sway over a wilderness empire that included many Indian tribes and extended over thousands of miles.

The first Fort Chartres was commenced in 1718 when Lieutenant Pierre Dugue de Boisbriant, a Canadian holding a French commission, accompanied by several officers and a large body of troops, arrived at Kaskaskia by boat from New Orleans. A site was selected about eighteen miles north of that little village and by the spring of 1720 the fort was substantially completed. It was a stockade of wood strengthened with earth between the palisades. Within the enclosure were the commandant’s house, a barracks, a store-house and a blacksmith shop, all constructed of hand-sawed lumber.

Almost immediately a village of Indians and traders sprang up around the place and the enterprising Jesuits built a church, St. Anne de Chartres, where many a service was recited for motley congregations of red and white. For thirty-six years this first Fort Chartres flourished and during this time was the setting for dramatic and pregnant happenings. Here, in 1720, came Phillippe Francois de Renault, bringing with him five hundred San Domingo negroes into the wilderness, thus introducing negro slavery into Illinois. In 1721 the post was visited by the famous Father Xavier de Charlevoix, in whose train was a young Canadian officer, Louis St. Ange de Belle Rive, who was destined afterward to be the commandant of the fort. Under the administration of the Sieur de Liette, 1725–1730, a captain in the Royal army, the French forces were engaged in armed pacification of the Fox Indians. Belle Rive succeeded de Liette and under his sway the post became the scene of social gayety.

In 1736 there left Fort Chartres a disastrous expedition against the Chickasaw Indians on the far distant Arkansas River. The result of this expedition was a defeat in which D’Artaguette, the leader, de Vincennes, for whom the little town of Vincennes, Indiana, is named, Father Senat, a Jesuit, and about fifteen other Frenchmen were taken prisoners and held for ransom. The ransom not arriving, the prisoners were roasted at a slow fire by their savage captors. A second expedition against the Chickasaws in 1739 was somewhat more successful.

By 1751 the fort was much out of repair and in this year there came to command it a French major of engineers (Irish by descent) Chevalier Macarty, who was accompanied by nearly a full regiment of grenadiers. In 1753 the second Fort Chartres, a solid structure of stone and one of the strongest fortifications ever erected on the American continent, was commenced by Macarty and his men. In 1756 it was finished. The site chosen was about a mile above the old fort and about half a mile back from the Mississippi River and would seem to have been a strange selection for such a structure, as it was low and marshy.

Of the first Fort Chartres not a sign remains to-day, and its exact site is a matter of disagreement. Of the second Fort Chartres the old powder magazine is to be seen. The fort itself has succumbed to the encroachments of the river, which cut away its bank even so far back as to undermine the walls of the fort itself and, in 1772, to cause the desertion of the structure by its garrison. The quarry from which the limestone of which the walls were constructed was obtained was located in the great bluffs four miles east of the point. The finer stone with which the arches and ornamental parts were faced came from beyond the Mississippi.

The fort covered altogether about four acres and was capable of sheltering a garrison of three hundred men. The expense of its erection was one million dollars, a sum of money only equalled in those days by the expenditure for the fortifications of Louisburg, Quebec, and Crown Point. It is generally believed that large profits went to the commandant and to others interested in its construction.

The command of the point in 1760 passed from Macarty to Nenon de Villiers, who led the French and Indians against Washington at Great Meadows in the skirmish which virtually was the opening engagement of the French and Indian War, a part of his force on this occasion being drawn from the garrison of Fort Chartres.

The veteran St. Ange de Belle Rive, stationed at Vincennes, took charge of the fort in 1764 and had the melancholy distinction of surrendering it to the English, October 10, 1765, when Captain Thomas Stirling came from Fort Pitt with one hundred Highlanders of the 42d British regiment,—a fitting distinction when one remembers that St. Ange had been in command of the first fort shortly after its establishment, and when there was no rival to French power in all of the West.

A predecessor of Fort Chartres in making sure French dominion of the West was Fort St. Louis, on Starved Rock, on the Illinois River, about forty miles southwest of Chicago of to-day and not far distant from the present-day city of Ottawa, Illinois. Of Fort St. Louis there remains not a trace, but to its existence and to La Salle, its intrepid founder, there will for centuries be a natural monument—that great towering crag upon whose flat summit the stronghold was built.

A natural phenomenon of great geologic interest, Starved Rock rises directly from a level river plain. Its sides are as steep as castle wall and attain a height of one hundred feet and more. The river washes its western base and its summit overhangs the stream so that water can be drawn therefrom by means of a bucket and a cord. On three sides the pinnacle of the rock is inaccessible and the fourth side might be held by a handful of men against an army. The top of the cliff measures about two hundred feet in diameter and is flat.

On this ideal site, in 1682, the French built Fort St. Louis. In less than three months fourteen thousand Indians lay encamped on the plains of the river within sound of the guns of the fort. To-day the point is a pleasure park.

From Fort St. Louis many an exploring expedition pushed forth into the wilderness and here many a treaty was concluded with savage tribes. While frequently obliged to give up command temporarily Henry de Tonti, La Salle’s very faithful lieutenant, was supreme at Fort St. Louis practically from its foundation until its abandonment in 1702. In 1718 a number of French traders were making it their headquarters, but its military history ceased with Tonti’s departure.

A predecessor even of Fort St. Louis was Fort Crevecœur—Fort of the Broken Heart—which wore its poetic name for only a few months after its construction in 1680, by La Salle, on the east shore of the Illinois River, not far below Peoria Lake. Fort Crevecœur was destroyed by mutineers during the absence of its commander, Tonti, and was not rebuilt, Fort St. Louis succeeding to its mission. The exact site to-day is a matter of dispute.

Fort Crevecœur was the fourth in La Salle’s comprehensive scheme of a chain of fortifications to extend from Quebec, the centre of French power, up the St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes, across the portage country which lay between the western lakes and the headwaters of the navigable tributaries of the Mississippi and then down the Mississippi to its mouth, thus hemming in the English to their coast possessions east of the Appalachian range, and ensuring the vast major part of the American continent to the French. The other three of La Salle’s fortifications at this date were Fort Frontenac, now Kingston, Ontario, Canada; Fort Niagara, commanding the passage from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, and Detroit, commanding the passage from Erie to Michigan.

The foundation of the city of Detroit thus needs no further pointing out. Where La Salle’s tentative fortifications were the city now presents a busy water-front, with steamers and factories and great buildings where Indian canoes and the palisades of the French once were.

Developments of this plan of La Salle’s, which was adhered to tenaciously by the French for almost a century, until they fell before the slow-growing mass of the English, were Michillimackinac and a chain of posts along the Ohio River. Of this Ohio series the most important element was the much fought over Fort Duquesne—the objective of Braddock’s fateful march—later Fort Pitt, and now the city of Pittsburgh.

Copyright, Detroit Publishing Co.

WATER-FRONT OF PRESENT-DAY DETROIT
Where Indian canoes and the palisades of the French were

The visitor to Pittsburgh to-day will find on Fourth street, midway between the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers, a little block-house, more correctly a redoubt, sixteen by fifteen feet in lateral dimensions and twenty-two feet high. The structure is constructed of brick covered with clapboards and with a layer of double logs, and contains thirty-six port-holes in two layers. This little block-house is all that remains to-day of Fort Pitt. It was built by Colonel Boquet in 1764 and was purchased by private parties in the early days of Pittsburgh. In 1894 the property was deeded by its owner of that generation, Mrs. Mary E. Schenley, of London, to the Pennsylvania Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and is maintained by this organization to-day for the benefit of the public.

The situation of Fort Pitt and its predecessor, Fort Duquesne, was of immense strategic importance in the early days of the American nation, the considerations which gave it value having operated in the field of commerce in late years to make Pittsburgh notable as a manufacturing and distributing centre. It stood at the gateway to the Ohio River and the rich country which the Ohio waters, and since it commanded the Ohio it commanded the key to the West.

These considerations were appreciated by the Colonial Virginians, and in 1754 Captain William Trent was commissioned by Governor Dinwiddie, of Virginia, to erect a fort at the juncture of the Monongahela and the Allegheny Rivers at the expense of the Ohio Company. Captain Trent commenced his work in February, 1754, but in April, 1754, surrendered to a detachment of French under Le Mercier.

The French then commenced the erection of a fort of their own on the extreme neck of land between the rivers. They finished their work in the summer of that year and named it Fort Duquesne in honor of Governor-General Duquesne, of Canada.

In the same year a force of English colonists, about 150 strong, made a tentative advance against the work under the leadership of our own George Washington, then a young man. Washington found the post too strong for attack and became himself the object of hostile attention from the French, being forced to fall back to Great Meadows and to erect a temporary triangular earth fortification there which he named Fort Necessity.

In 1755 it was the plan of the British ministry to concentrate its forces in the colonies in three directions of attack against the French. One blow was to be struck at Acadia; a second blow was to be struck at Crown Point, and a third, under General Braddock, an English-born officer of wide Continental experience, at Fort Duquesne.

From a painting in the collection of the Pennsylvania Historical Society

OLD BLOCK-HOUSE, FORT PITT, PITTSBURGH, PA.

Braddock’s unfortunate march began May 27, 1755, from Fort Cumberland, Maryland (Cumberland, to-day), and of the details of that disastrous journey little need be told in these pages as the story is already familiar. Braddock had the bravery of his calling and the arrogance and presumption of the European brought into contact with provincials. He did not believe that anything very good could come out of the colonies and did not hesitate to show this attitude of mind. On the line of march he scorned to send out scouts ahead as was necessary in fighting Indians. He insisted on sending his Continental troops in solid order against an enemy who fought behind trees and stumps in any kind of order that suited his purpose. He committed all of the stupidities that vanity and overweening self-confidence could dictate, and, when the French in a despairing last-minute effort against overwhelming numbers had found easy victory, gave up his life on the field of battle. He was buried beneath the feet of the retreating troops so that their steps should obliterate from the fiendish enemy the location of his last resting place.

The English loss in this battle was 714 men killed and a shattering of their military prestige with all of the Indian people of the borderland. The French loss was 3 white men killed and 27 Indians. The access to their influence amongst the savage tribes because of their unexpected victory was much.

Fort Duquesne fell to the English in 1758 when 7,000 men under Brigadier General John Forbes slowly and circumspectly proceeded against it. The French deserted the post after attempting to destroy it and the English took possession November 25 of that year. A new fort was commenced under Forbes which stood on the Monongahela side of the city at the south end of the present West Street and between West and Liberty Streets. It was occupied in 1760 and was completely finished in the summer of 1761. The stone bomb-proof magazine stood until 1852 when the Pennsylvania Railroad built its freight terminal here.

Of the remainder of the line of French forts along the Ohio River there are no relics left, though memorials have been established at several points. The first of this Ohio River chain was Presque Isle on Lake Erie, now the little city of Erie, Pennsylvania. For some years after French domain in the New World Presque Isle was of importance and, indeed, for some years after the Revolution.

The post was taken by the English in 1759, and in 1763 fell a victim to Indian attack as a corollary to the Pontiac conspiracy which had as its object the complete extinction of English life in the West. The fort, a rectangle of earth and wooden palisades, stood on the west bank of Mill Creek and at the intersection with the shore of the lake. Here the veteran Indian fighter, General Wayne, died in 1796. In 1876 the State of Pennsylvania erected a block-house on the site of the old fort as a memorial. This block-house is now included in the grounds of the Pennsylvania Sailors and Soldiers’ Home.

From Presque Isle there was a portage to Fort Le Bœuf, now the little city of Waterford, Pennsylvania. Fort Le Bœuf stood at High and Water Streets, Waterford, though there is at this point no sign of its existence. It was erected in 1753 and fell before Pontiac’s far-reaching conspiracy in 1763.

Venango, the next of the French line of forts east of Pittsburgh (Duquesne), was the fore-runner of Franklin, Pennsylvania, and stood at Elk and Eighth Streets. Of Venango, too, no sign remains. It fell to the Indians in 1763.

South of Pittsburgh the English had a post at Brownsville, on the Ohio River, Pennsylvania, built in 1754, and known as Redstone Old Fort. The French had Fort Massac to which about one thousand troopers retired after the evacuation of Fort Duquesne. Later years also saw small fortifications developed on the Ohio River, some holding the potentialities of future greatness such as that at the falls of the Ohio River, which was to be the nucleus of the settlement of the present-day city of Louisville, Kentucky.

At the south end of Lake Erie during the French occupancy of the West stood Fort Sandusky which has given its name to the City of Sandusky of to-day. On the Maumee River, Indiana, was Fort Miamis, Miami of to-day.

In the early days of the French there had been a trading post at the site of the future great city of Chicago, but it remained for the United States, in 1803, to establish a formal fortification here, Fort Dearborn, of bloody memory. Fort Dearborn, as every good Chicagoan knows, or ought to know, stood at the southern approach to the Rush Street bridge and extended a little across Michigan Avenue and somewhat into the river, as it now is. The ground rose into a little mound yielding a fine view of the surrounding flat prairie land. Here the pioneer soldiers erected a rude stockade of logs fifteen feet in height and enclosing a space sufficiently large to contain a small parade ground, officers’ quarters, troop barracks, guard house, magazines and two block-houses, one at the northwest and the other at the southeast corner of the palisade. This rude structure with its small garrison was the seed of the present-day great city.

Upon the outbreak of the War of 1812 General Hull, who was commanding the American army of the border, ordered the evacuation of Fort Dearborn, as the place was too remote to be adequately defended and as its possession meant no access of strength to the United States. There were at this time in the garrison four officers and fifty-four non-commissioned officers and privates under the leadership of Captain Nathan Heald. The wives of the two senior officers were with them and a number of the privates had, also, their families, so that the stockade contained twelve women and twenty children.

Though an experienced soldier, Captain Heald seems to have misjudged the temper of the hostile Indians surrounding his post and to have too easily accepted their assurances of non-interference with the garrison as it left the fort. At all events, on August 15, 1812, Captain Heald evacuated his fort, and though the Indians allowed the little company—a long cavalcade—to proceed as far as the end of present-day Eighteenth Street without molestation, they then fell upon men, women and children indiscriminately. Of the company of Americans only a handful survived.

In 1816 Fort Dearborn was rebuilt and regarrisoned but after the Black Hawk war fell into disuse, and in 1837 was abandoned by the army. It was used for various purposes by different departments of the Federal government until 1857, when it was torn down except a small building which stood until the great fire of 1871. A commercial building now occupies the site which is commemorated by a small bronze tablet set into the wall by the Chicago Historical Society in 1880.

At the foot of Eighteenth Street at the point where the attack upon the devoted column commenced, a beautiful bronze monument has been erected depicting a scene from the massacre.

Fort Gage, Illinois, memorable as the first objective of George Rogers Clark in 1778, stood at the historic little village Kaskaskia, of French foundation, on the Kaskaskia River near the confluence of that stream with the Mississippi. In shape an oblong, 280 feet by 251 feet, constructed of squared timbers founded upon heavy earthwork, Fort Gage was never heavily garrisoned. It was the point to which the British retired when the crumbling walls of Fort Chartres would no longer hold them. In 1772 the garrison consisted of one officer and twenty soldiers. In 1778 when Clark reached the spot there was not a British soldier on duty and the fort was in command of a Frenchman.

Fort Clark, Illinois, was erected in 1813 on the site of the future city of Peoria, Illinois, and about where the Rock Island depot now stands. For several years it gave its name to the locality and was a post of importance garrisoned by rangers and United States troops. At one time it sustained a severe Indian attack.

The foundation of Cincinnati, Ohio, was Fort Washington, which was in existence until after the War of 1812.

[FORT INDEPENDENCE]
(CASTLE WILLIAM)
CASTLE ISLAND—BOSTON HARBOR

That Bostonians are thankful people truly appreciating their public blessings is amply proved by the way in which they turn out to Fort Independence, Castle Island, now a part of the Marine Park of their city, for the fresh air and unexciting recreation it offers. Other citizens of other cities create parks from their historic places and, then, content to know that they have them when they want them, allot the day and night watchmen entire seclusion in these domains. With Bostonians it is different: On any bright and cheering day throngs can be found at the old fort, of various classes and of widely sundered poles of thought; but joined together in one great common heritage, a capacity for making use of that which they have and of taking their pleasure in a devout and noiseless manner not to be seen amongst the habitants of any other great American city.

It is a pleasant place, Castle Island, and the air there on a sunny day sweeping in from the great reaches of Boston’s environing waters is a true elixir. The views in various directions are entrancing, showing, in one direction, wide expanses of blue with dim islands in the distance and cottony clouds overhead; in another, the shipping and sky-line of Boston harbor and the jumbled city. Geographically stated, Castle Island is a body of hard, rocky land, most of which is occupied by the historic old fort, and it is situated three miles from the head of Boston Harbor and two hundred yards from City Point, South Boston, to which it is connected by a wooden causeway. On the mainland, close at hand, lies Boston’s famous Aquarium, where the flying fishes play!

Viewed from the head of the causeway, the fort is a very gay and martial figure though in sober earnest it has never fired a shot in anger in its life. Structurally speaking, it is a pentagonal, five-bastioned enclosure whose granite walls occupy all of the crest of the eminence which makes up the island. To the right, from this stand-point, one sees running off a long thin shallow strip of gravelly sand, which geologists assert has been a gift from the sea since the erection of the fort. Originally, they say, the main portion of the island was larger than it is now; so what was taken from one place seems to have been added on to another.

FORT INDEPENDENCE FROM THE WATER, BOSTON, MASS.
Floating Hospital in Foreground

Passing over the causeway one sees to the left hand, across a ribbon of water, the island which Fort Winthrop crowns in a very modest and inconspicuous fashion. Passing over a draw-bridge one enters the reservation and finds one’s self beneath the shadow of the walls of the fort and on the historic ground which its predecessors and itself have held in fief for many, many years. Benches may be found here and there for the rest-seeking wayfarer, but if one is inspired to wander around the walls he will find many interesting sights, and will be increasingly struck by the strength and formidableness of the abandoned military work, highly suggestive of the time when this island was the seat of military power of his Majesty, the King of England, in his colonies in America.

Historically speaking, Fort Independence is one of the oldest fortified spots in America and it was of exceeding great dignity in the early days of this country. But four years subsequent to the incorporation of the town of Boston, an interesting event which took place in 1630, Governor Winthrop and a party of his Puritans visited the island and, we are told, were detained by the ice without shelter for a day and a night. Nevertheless so well able were they all to detach themselves from their personal petty feelings that they each subscribed five pounds sterling of Great Britain from their own pockets in order to raise the place to the dignity of a fortified point. Two “Platforms” and a fort were to be erected, these platforms being in the nature of bateaux with guns mounted upon them. In the July following their adventure, which had taken place in early spring, they induced the legislature to consent to fortifying the place. The first fort has been described as a “castle with mud walls.” The masonry was of lime made from oyster shells.

In 1644 the arrival of a French man-of-war in the harbor of Boston so alarmed the citizens of the province that the fort which had gone into decay was rebuilt at the expense of six neighboring towns. It was now constructed of pine trees, stone and earth, was 50 feet square inside and had walls 10 feet thick.

In 1665 the fort was repaired and enlarged,—the spirit of military preparedness which had been awakened by the Frenchman’s arrival having evidently been kept up. A small castle was added with brick walls and three stories in height. There was a dwelling-room on the first floor of this “castle”; a lodging-room above; a gun-room over the latter furnished with “six very good saker guns” and three lesser guns were mounted upon the roof. In this same year occurred an event which gave rise to much curious speculation at the time and is retained in legend. On the 15th of July a stroke of lightning entered one of the rooms of the fort, killed Captain Richard Davenport, the commanding officer, and did not enter the magazine, only a step away, beyond a thin partition, where there was stored enough gunpowder to have blown the fort beyond the seas.

Still the spirit of fire had its due, for in 1673 the fort was burned to the ground. In the year following a new fort of stone was erected. It had four bastions, mounted thirty-eight guns and sixteen culverins, in addition to a water battery of six guns, and was a very imposing work indeed.

In 1689 the people of Boston, favoring the Cromwellians in England, seized the royal governor, Edmund Andros, and placed him in confinement. They took possession of the castle and appointed Mr. John Fairweather commander to succeed Captain John Pipon.

But all dissension is smoothed down by the hand of Time. Under the administration of Sir Williams Phipps, an appointee of King William, the fort was named Castle William and the Crown donated a large sum of money toward the erection of a stronger structure. The ordnance then became 24 nine-pounders, 12 twenty-four pounders, 18 thirty-two pounders, and 18 forty-eight pounders; and the bastions became known by the names of the “Crown,” the “Rose,” the “Royal,” and the “Elizabeth.” This augmentation of strength was the more necessary as a French invasion of the New England colonies was apprehended.

And so we run on through the years: In 1716 Lieutenant Governor William Dummer, a well-known name in the history of Massachusetts, assumed command of Castle William, agreeable to orders from the Crown, and thereby incurred the ill-feeling of the general court of the province which heretofore had had prerogative in the appointment of a commandant. In 1740 the fort was repaired in anticipation of war with France and a new bastion mounting 20 forty-two pounders was created and named Shirley bastion.

Ordnance presented by the King arrived in 1744; a second magazine was built in 1747; and a third added during Shirley’s administration. In 1747 a riot occurred in Boston and the governor took refuge at the Castle. Upon assurance that his authority would be sustained the governor returned to the city two days after his flight.

On the 15th of August, 1757, Governor Pownal arrived to assume the government of the province. Sir William Pepperell, conqueror of Louisburg, held command of Castle William. In accordance with custom Sir William surrendered the key of the castle to the new executive and said, “Sir, I hand you the key of the province.” Not outdone at all, Governor Pownal replied, “Sir, the interests of the province are in your heart. I shall always be glad, therefore, to see the key of the province in your hands.” Thus the doughty old warrior was maintained in his command until his death in 1759.

In this same year died Captain Lieutenant John Larrabee, who had lived for fifty years on the island in the service of the Crown. In 1764 the Castle was used as an inoculation station during the ravages of a plague of smallpox which swept the little city.

FORT WINTHROP FROM CASTLE ISLAND [top]
Main Entrance
FORT INDEPENDENCE, CASTLE ISLAND, BOSTON, MASS.

It was about this time that the fort began to take part in the events with which Boston is associated before the outbreak of the American Revolution. Stamps by which revenue was expected to be raised from the colonies were brought to Boston in 1765 and for security were lodged in Castle William. Vigorous opposition in America caused the repealment of the act of which they were intended to be the tokens of enforcement and they were taken back to England at the expiration of not many months. These, it will be seen, were not the stamps which figured in the famous Boston Tea Party, but they were of the same nature. The maintenance of a large force of military at Castle William by the Crown in the years immediately following this was a source of irritation to the patriots of the day, and had an influence in determining the events which brought about the separation from the Mother Country.

Captain Sir Thomas Adams, who died on board the frigate Romney, was buried on Castle Island October 8, 1772, and his obsequies were conducted with great pomp. In removing earth to Fort Independence thirty years later his corpse, enclosed in a double coffin highly ornamented, but upon which the inscription had become illegible, was dug out, and, no one discovering at the time whose remains the coffin contained, it was committed to the common burying ground at the south point of the island where its resting-place was soon not to be distinguished from that of the common soldiers which surrounded it.

With this coffin necessarily others were removed, and one was favored with an inscription which betrayed, we may assume, either native simplicity or British sarcasm. It read: “Here lies the body of John, aged fifty years, a faithful soldier and a Desperate Good Gardner”!

It does not appear that the force quartered on the island was engaged in the first two battles of the Revolution. The commandant of the castle had been sent in February, 1776, to seize powder and other military stores at Salem; but he was delayed at the ferry by the militia until the objects of the depredation had been moved beyond his reach. He returned peaceably to the island. The same officer was ordered from Castle William at this time with five hundred men to draw the Americans, by a false attack, from their posts at Roxbury. The attack did not succeed and the burning of five or six houses in Dorchester was the only result.

In the meantime a formidable force of Americans was concentrated in the vicinity of Boston under Washington; so General Howe, the successor of General Gage, evacuated the town March 17, and the British fleet dropped below the Castle. The embarkation had been a scene of confusion and distress, it being the 27th of March before the transports were able to put to sea. At their departure the British troops threw into the water iron balls and shot, broke off the trunnions of the ordnance given to Castle William in 1740, destroyed the military stores and battery apparatus which they could not take with them and finally blew up the citadel, leaving the island a mass of ruins. Part of the British fleet lay in the lower harbor until June, when it was harassed by American troops under General Lincoln and raised the blockade of Boston Harbor after the exact duration of two years. With the British troops the seat of the war was removed from Massachusetts, and Castle Island was thenceforth, unmolested, in American possession.

Colonel John Turnbull was the officer sent by General Washington to take possession of the island after the evacuation. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Revere was stationed on the island from 1777 to 1779.

At the conclusion of the Revolution it was enacted by the legislature of Massachusetts that all criminals of the State under sentence of confinement should be removed to Castle Island. Pursuant to this law convicts were sent to the island, and though their number never exceeded ninety their audacity taxed the vigilance of the garrison; they made several bold, fruitless efforts to escape, and in their mutinies some were killed and some wounded. Others met their death while endeavoring to form subterranean passages. Stephen Burroughs, whose extensive forgeries gave him great notoriety, here learned the art of a nailer, and in his published memoirs has publicly boasted of his Castle Island exploits.

It was with reluctance that the legislature of Massachusetts could bring itself to the cession of the Castle to the United States government, but the State was nevertheless willing to sacrifice the partial advantage to the public good and, October, 1798, passed an act by which the transfer was accomplished.

In 1799 President Adams visited the fort and was received with due honors. It was at this time that the name was changed to Independence. With regard to this, Captain Nehemiah Freeman wrote: “The baptism was not indecorous and the godfather (President Adams) is certainly unexceptionable; but Fort Independence must count some years before he can entirely divest his elder brother of his birthright; and though the mess of pottage might have been sold in 1776 yet the title of ‘The Castle’ is rather endearing to the inhabitants of Massachusetts and is still bestowed by the greater part as the only proper appellation.”

A new fort was now planned and constructed under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Louis Toussard, who was inspector of all of the posts of the Eastern seaboard. The first stone was laid May 7, 1801, and the whole superstructure was raised from an original design not influenced by the structure standing hitherto. On the 23d of June, 1802, the national colors were first displayed at the new fort. The work was a barbette fortification and was not materially different from the present-day structure.

HARBOR SIDE, FORT INDEPENDENCE, BOSTON, MASS.

The five bastions of the fort were named, in 1805, as follows: First, “Winthrop” after Governor Winthrop, under whose auspices the first fort was built; second, “Shirley,” who repaired Castle William, erected other works and made it the strongest fortified point in British America; third, “Hancock,” after the first governor of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, under whose administration new works were thrown up; fourth, “Adams,” after John Adams, who bestowed its present name upon the fort and collected materials for its construction; fifth, “Dearborn,” after General Dearborn, Secretary of War, under whose auspices Fort Independence was actually rebuilt.

In 1833 the garrison was withdrawn and the post given over to the Engineers Department for constructing a new work, in effect a modernification and improved edition of the former structure. Work was prosecuted at intervals during the succeeding eighteen years. The post was regarrisoned July 4, 1851. The garrison was finally withdrawn November 25, 1879, and Fort Independence went out of service.

Not long after that the island was deeded to the city by the Federal War Department for use as a public park. That it could ever be of service as a fighting man now in its old age is extremely improbable. The defence of Boston depends upon batteries located at a far greater distance from the city.

To the north from Fort Independence can be seen the island upon which Fort Winthrop is situated and in the distance at the mouth of the harbor can be seen dimly the site of Fort Warren. Both of these posts have reached a dignified age, but neither has years or historical importance approximating that of their big brother.

[FORT COLUMBUS, OR JAY]
GOVERNOR’S ISLAND—NEW YORK HARBOR

Even Governor’s Island, once a smiling garden, appertaining to the sovereigns of the province, was now covered with fortifications, inclosing a tremendous block-house,—so that this once peaceful island resembled a fierce little warrior in a big cocked hat, breathing gunpowder and defiance to the world!—Washington Irving, “Knickerbocker’s New York.”

The graceful little island of Washington Irving is described in a recent publication of the government printing office at Washington after the following eloquent fashion: “Irregular in form but approaches nearly the segment of an oblate spheroid, its longest diameter being from north to south, and about 800 yards in length. The transverse diameter is about 500 yards. It has an elevation above high-water mark of 20 feet, and its face is smooth and green, with a rich carpet of grass.”

On the top of the highest feature of this smooth, green face with its rich carpet of grass is Fort Columbus, more properly known by its ancient name of Fort Jay.

ENTRANCE TO FORT COLUMBUS (FORT JAY) GOVERNOR’S ISLAND,
NEW YORK HARBOR

No doubt you will find it hard to visualize the importance of Fort Jay. It is the head-quarters of the Department of the East of the army of the United States, you may be told. Yes, you will answer indifferently, it is a quiet little place, not nearly so noisy as the roaring forties of Broadway; it keeps to itself and is a sort of annex to the foot of the city to prevent the sea-ward view from the Battery being without variety! Yet once on a time, not much more than a hundred years ago, Fort Jay was of so great importance to the city that the citizens all, rich men, poor men, beggarmen, and thieves (then, too), turned out in a body to build up the place overnight.

The first point of land ever occupied in New York by the Dutch was Governor’s Island, we are told on the excellent authority of Joseph Dankers and Sluyter, of Wueward, in Frusland, in “A Voyage to The American Colonies in 1679–80”: “In its mouth (East River) before the city, between the city and Red Hook on Long Island, lies Noten Island (Governor’s Island) opposite the fort, the first place the Hollanders ever occupied in the bay. It is now only a farm with a house and a place upon it where the governor keeps a parcel of sheep.”

The fort here referred to was not Jay but Fort Amsterdam, later Fort George, of historic memory, which stood on Manhattan where the Customs House of New York City now is. “Red Hook on Long Island” later was fortified, too, forming one of the line of defences captured by the British from the Americans in their descent upon New York in the early days of the Revolution. The Indian name for Governor’s Island was Pagganck, and Noten—as above written,—or Nutten, or Nooten, came about from the abundance of nuts which could be found on the island.

Fort Washington Point. Fort Lee on Opposite Shore [top]
Where was Fort Amsterdam; the Customs House
FORT SITES IN PRESENT-DAY NEW YORK CITY

In 1637, the redoubtable Wouter Van Twiner, first governor of the colony under the New Amsterdam company of which he had been a director, secured for his personal use the island. It is fair to look at this gentleman inquisitively. “The renowned Wouter (or Walter) Van Twiller was descended from a long line of Dutch Burgomasters,” says Washington Irving, “who had successively dozed away their lives, and grown fat upon the bench of magistracy in Rotterdam; and who had comported themselves with such singular wisdom and propriety that they were never either heard or talked of—which, next to being universally applauded, should be the object of ambition of all magistrates and rulers ... many a dunderpate, like the owl, the stupidest of birds, comes to be considered the very type of wisdom. This, by the way, is a casual remark which I would not for the universe have it thought I apply to Governor Van Twiller. It is true he was a man shut up within himself, like an oyster, and rarely spoke except in monosyllables; but then it was allowed he seldom said a foolish thing. So invincible was his gravity that he was never known to laugh or even to smile through the whole course of a long and prosperous life. Nay, if a joke were uttered in his presence, that set light-minded hearers in a roar, it was observed to throw him into a state of perplexity. Sometimes he would deign to inquire into the matter, and when, after much explanation, the joke was made as plain as a pike-staff, he would continue to smoke his pipe in silence and at length, knocking out the ashes, would exclaim, ‘Well, I see nothing in all that to laugh about.’

“The person of this illustrious old gentleman was formed and proportioned as though it had been moulded by the hands of some cunning Dutch statuary, as a model of majesty and lordly grandeur. He was exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet five inches in circumference. His head was a perfect sphere and of such stupendous dimensions that Dame Nature with all her sex’s ingenuity would have been puzzled to construct a neck capable of supporting it; wherefore she wisely declined the attempt and settled it firmly on the top of his backbone just between the shoulders. His body was oblong and particularly capacious at bottom; which was wisely ordained by Providence, seeing that he was a man of sedentary habits and very averse to the idle labor of walking. His legs were short but sturdy in proportion to the weight they had to sustain; so that when erect he had not a little the appearance of a beer-barrel on skids. His face, that infallible index of the mind, presented a vast expanse unfurrowed by any of those lines and angles which disfigure the human countenance with what is termed expression. Two small gray eyes twinkled feebly in the midst, like two stars of lesser magnitude in a hazy firmament, and his full-fed cheeks, which seemed to have taken toll of everything that went into his mouth, were curiously mottled and streaked with dusky red, like a Spitzenberg apple.”

After the seizure of the colony by the British in 1664, the island became a perquisite of the governor’s office, a sort of retreat from care for the occupant of that harassed position, and was developed into a smiling garden. At this time it became known as Governor’s Island, the name that has become its official designation on the charts of the present day.

The first immigrants to New York under the English were assigned by the council to Nutten Island for detention until the presence or non-presence of contagious disease in their ranks could be proved. These immigrants were about fifty Palatines who had been driven from their home land by the war between Louis XIV and Holland and Austria. Subsequently 10,000 followed these first fifty unfortunate exiles. The island thus became the first quarantine station of the city of New York.

During the wars of the Spanish Succession until the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 the people of the colonies of British North America were in constant dread of attack by the French navy and during this time it was urged continually that Governor’s Island should be changed from a garden to a fortified spot. Notwithstanding this fact the successive executives Slaughter, Fletcher and Cornbury did nothing toward carrying out the desires of their subjects.

It was a happy-go-lucky, careless era. Indeed when one looks back upon the perils of the early colonies and how they were survived it is like looking back upon the perils of childhood and wondering how one ever managed to get through. The colonies “just growed,” which is true of a variety of things in this world, no doubt.

During Governor Cornbury’s administration, fifteen thousand pounds (a value in present day terms of far beyond seventy-five thousand dollars) was appropriated for building a fort upon Governor’s Island, but Governor Cornbury used the money to build a pleasure house instead, to which he and succeeding governors might retire from press of business.

Governor Cornbury, we may believe, was an edifying addition to the staid burgher circles of old New York. He was a small, shrimpish man, we are told, and inordinately vain. Being a cousin to her most Christian Majesty, Queen Anne, to which circumstance he owed his appointment, and having been assured that he resembled her hugely in appearance, he was in the habit of dressing himself like a woman and posing upon the balcony of his home—that New Yorkers might be thrilled by a reflection of royalty. Despite his royal connections his household was most impecunious and his wife gained a reputation for borrowing things which she had no intention of ever giving back. Whenever the executive coach would be seen going the round of the streets on social duties bent, the good wives who might expect visits from her ladyship would say, it is said, “Quick, put away that fancy work and that vase” (or this and that), “Kathrine! Her ladyship is about to call upon us.”

Father Time strolled on through the terms of the various royal governors noting their idiosyncrasies and continually hearing the cry that Governor’s Island should be fortified, but not by any of these gentlemen did he discover action taken. It was not until after the Continental Congress, October 6, 1775, directed that means should be immediately devised to make New York defensible that the little city one morning woke up to find that there were rudimentary fortifications on Governor’s Island. Of course these fortifications were supplementary to the fort on the main island upon which the city chiefly depended, Fort George. This was the name the English had given to Fort Amsterdam’s successor, an enlarged and strengthened edition of its original.

Of little avail did all of these works prove, however, for the English, after the battle of Long Island, August 27, 1776, were easily masters of the Americans in that part of the world. On August 30th, Admiral Howe sailed up New York Bay and anchored near the island, and the city of New York passed into British possession, not to be surrendered until the close of the war.

The little force of men on Governor’s Island under the command of Colonel Prescott abandoned the place on the approach of the British. One man was injured by a bullet in the arm as they were pulling away from the island. The place was garrisoned by the British during their occupancy of New York and was fortified more extensively than it ever had been before.

The site of all of these works was the site of present-day Fort Columbus or Fort Jay.

After the Revolution the value of Governor’s Island as a place of fortification was not taken advantage of and the works were allowed to fall into decay. In 1784 Governor Clinton leased the spot to a certain Dr. Price as the site for a hotel and race course. This course was open during 1785 and 1786 and had staged upon it many exciting trials of speed.

We have seen Governor’s Island as a flowery retreat for the governors of New York from the cares of office, and we have looked in upon it in the charge of the rough soldiery of England. We now see it as the scene of the dissipations of the rabble and the lusty young sports of the old city. Yet another day is in store for the historic spot.

After the retirement of Washington from the presidency the irritation between France and this country became intense, and fears were entertained of conflict between the European nation and its young former protégé. Agitation began once more in New York for the building up of the defensive works on Governor’s Island. Pressing recommendations were made to the federal authorities. The story may be taken up and carried on here in the words of a government report:

“The Secretary of War reported, December 19, 1794, that one bastion commanding two low batteries had been undertaken and was in a considerable state of forwardness, but observed that the works being only sodded would not stand very long. On January 18, 1796, the Secretary reported to the Senate that Governor’s Island had been fortified with a fort made of earth and two batteries, under its protection, partly lined with brick masonry; that there had been erected two hot air furnaces, a large powder magazine and a barracks for the garrison; on February 10, 1797, that no alterations had been made since January 1796, except in the repairs and such additions as could he made to the garrison. During this time there had been expended by the general government on the fortifications of the island as follows: 1794, $1,327; in 1795, $6,866.54; in 1796, $1,124.

“But now the apprehension of a French invasion caused such clamor for protection among the people that immediate attention by the general government was bestowed upon properly fortifying Governor’s Island. Thirty thousand one hundred and seventeen dollars was at once appropriated to be expended upon the fort, which now became known as Fort Jay. Such was the fervor of the day that the professors and students of Columbia College went in a body to Governor’s Island and worked on the fortifications with shovels and wheelbarrows.

FORT LAFAYETTE FROM FORT HAMILTON, NEW YORK

“Liberal appropriations were made by Congress in the three succeeding years for completing and improving the fort. In 1799, Congress appropriated $30,116.18; in 1800, $20,124; in 1801, $10,338.05. No further improvements were made until 1806, when Fort Jay with the whole of its buildings was demolished except the walled counterscarp, the gate, the sally-port, the magazine, and two barracks; all the rest was removed to give place for a work of durable materials. On the site of the old fort a new one, Fort Columbus, was erected, an inclosed pentagonal work with four bastions of masonry, calculated for one hundred guns, being of the same shape on three sides as Fort Jay, with the addition of fourteen feet on each side, and on the north side of a ravelin, with two retired casemates. Such was Fort Columbus when it was completed in 1809.”

Despite the flurried haste of New Yorkers to have the fort completed, despite the unprecedented exertions of the Columbia students with shovels and wheelbarrows, Fort Columbus, or Jay as it has been rebaptized of recent years in military circles, has never been in active service.

Indeed, during the war of 1812, only three years after its completion, the need of a post farther out to sea than this called for the erection of that quaint little brick strong-box just off present-day Fort Hamilton known as Fort Lafayette. It was called originally Fort Diamond but was renamed in honor of the great Frenchman on his visit to this country in 1824. Overshadowed by its great modern neighbor (Fort Hamilton), the little fortification is rarely observed, but it is still in active service and might give good account of itself if called upon to do so, better account in fact than its sire nestling close to America’s greatest city.

Not far from Fort Jay on Governor’s Island is a little work whose name is not unfamiliar to New Yorkers. It is Castle Williams. Begun in 1807, it was completed in 1811 and as a military weapon has never been of service to the city which it was created to help protect. As a landmark in the harbor, however, it has acquired some little distinction solely through merit of the years, just as some men live through an entirely commonplace youth and middle age to become in their last years notable figures in their communities as classmates of Father Time.

At about the time that Castle Williams was being constructed, a similar work was in erection just off the Battery, Manhattan, on a ledge of rocks now a part of the city itself. This was Fort Clinton, which is the Castle Garden, or Aquarium, of the present day. Fort Jay and Castle Williams, Fort Clinton and the Battery were the outing places of New Yorkers before the Civil War. To the Island or the Battery did the residents of the city repair for air and recreation on holidays and Sundays. An illuminating picture of this phase of the city’s life is drawn by Abram C. Dayton in his “Last Days of Knickerbocker Life in New York.”

“Castle Garden, the legend says,” he writes, “was created to protect the city against invasion. Whether these invaders were to be New Jersey Indians armed with bows and arrows or Staten Island pirates bent upon destruction with popguns and firecrackers is not related; but it is certain a very limited force would have been required to effect an entrance through its brick walls. About the time we write of its loud-mouthed armament had been removed” (about 1860): “it had been placed by special orders from somewhere on a peace footing. It was neither a concert saloon, an opera house, nor a receptacle for needy immigrants; but the old white-washed barn was devoted to the restaurant business on a very limited scale, as ice cream, lemonade, and sponge cake constituted the list of delicacies from which to select. The ticket of admission required to pass its portcullis cost one shilling; but that was a mere form instituted to guarantee perfect decorum, for it was redeemed as cash in exchange for either of the above specified articles of refreshment. At the close of a summer day its frowning battlements were crowded with listeners eager to catch a strain of martial music wafted from Governor’s Island.

“Rabineau’s swimming bath was moored to the wooden bridge which connected the old fort with the Battery grounds; and on its roof protected by an awning might be seen, after banking hours on summer afternoons, substantial citizens comfortably seated and refreshing themselves after their bath with the sea breeze, accompanied by mint julep and sherry cobblers.”

Prior to 1852, Fort Columbus was for several different short periods of time empty of troops, but since that year it has always contained a garrison. In addition to being the head-quarters of the Department of the East, the old post is now used as a military prison and as a landing-place for the aërial branch of the army.

A visit to Governor’s Island to-day is a pleasant excursion for a stranger in new New York and the port would be a new sight for most New Yorkers, so unfamiliar are familiar places to those who are closest to them. One must have a pass from the military authorities at the island to go through the old works, but this can be secured upon written application without great difficulty by any citizen of the United States.

A fine figure of a place Fort Columbus seems to be,—rather a braggart in its way! It spreads out, girded by its “dry moat,” over the crest of the hill on which it is placed, in a truly threatening attitude. But one does not need to be told that this is hollow sham. A single shell from a modern engine of war would, no doubt, finish all of its pretensions.

Looking from its sunny interior beyond its battlemented walls one can see the airy fabric of New York’s marvellous sky-scrapers against the eastern sky, a poignant contrast to the old stronghold. Age and youth! In this comparison the fort has that advantage which always inheres in years, it has seen youth grow from infancy and it knows the quick passing of all things.

[TICONDEROGA]
LAKE CHAMPLAIN—NEW YORK

One could desire to be at the bold promontory of Ticonderoga in 1609, when the virgin woodside gazed anxiously at Samuel Champlain, that intrepid French adventurer, as he fired his bell-mouthed musket against the mystified Iroquois. The echoes of the discharge of this ancient firearm were seldom allowed to die in these wildernesses until the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, until the complete ascendency of white man over red had been established.

Standing upon the ramparts of the old fort one may to-day easily imagine himself in a virgin forest world. Civilization has set her hand upon Lake Champlain, but her work is not obtrusively near to the fort. The hills to the rear are still wooded; the waters, to front and sides, are clear; and the same blue bends over all. The immediate surroundings are little different from those in which Champlain fought his opera-bouffe fight and inaugurated the long struggle between red men and white in this part of the world.

We must remember that in 1609 the French had already taken hold of New France. They had a querulous, contumacious baby of a colony on the Saint Lawrence at Quebec and to this point came many curious red men. With some of these red men the French had formed alliance.

One tribe of these allies had seen the thunderous cannon and guns of the French and had suggested that these weapons be taken out and turned upon some of the ancient enemies of that tribe. The idea had appealed to Champlain as eminently a clever one, and with eleven other Frenchmen armed with arquebuses and clad in light armor he had set out, on the 28th of June, with three hundred amiable red people. The party proceeded up the Saint Lawrence as far as the river which afterward became known as the Richelieu and here paused for feasting and a carouse. During the course of this ceremony three-quarters of the Indians became huffy over a trifle and left for their homes in a hurry, reducing the expedition to eleven Frenchmen and seventy-five Indians.

As the expedition proceeded the Indians consulted their tutelary spirits. A small circular tent would be raised of skins over saplings and into this would crawl the medicine man with shudders and groans. A grand commotion would be heard and then the voice of the spirit would speak in a thin, treble squeak. The tent structure would dance violently around and the savage spectators would feel that their divinity was having a very busy time.

FORT TICONDEROGA, LAKE CHAMPLAIN, N. Y.

At length the French and Indians approached the lake which was to bear the name of the white chief, and made their way upon it in canoes. They came to a promontory of land which bore the resounding Iroquois name of Ticonderoga, or “meeting of waters,” in recognition of the fact that the waters of Lakes George and Champlain come together at the base of the eminence. Here they met a flotilla of skin canoes bearing a large war party of Iroquois and the issue of this little trip of Champlain’s may now be said to have been fairly joined.

The Iroquois, not being much given to fighting on water, paddled to land, while the invaders decided to spend the night in their canoes. All night long the air resounded with yells and epithets and bandied menaces, but, at length, morning broke and put an end to the unseemly clamor. The Frenchmen were concealed in the bottoms of canoes until a dramatic moment should arrive to show themselves. Their companions landed and now that they had come to their desire were filled with terror of the Iroquois, calling loudly for Champlain to come forth and destroy his opponents with thunder and lightning. The doughty Frenchman, feeling secure in his armor and his arms, threw aside the skins which covered him, and strode forth like a white god in shining raiment. The gallant Iroquois were filled with consternation at the sight of him. Raising his arquebus, into which he had stuffed four balls, he fired at short range, slaying two chiefs and wounding one. A second shot caused the defenders to break and flee, and this gave Champlain’s allies opportunity to kill and capture to their hearts’ content.

The expedition made its way back to Quebec filled with exultation. Thus did Ticonderoga come upon the pages of history.

This engagement of Champlain’s—incidental as it seems—had far-reaching consequences in the destiny of France in the New World. By the slaughter of the Iroquois Champlain mortally offended the Five Nations, which was an all-powerful Indian confederation, incurring an enmity never remitted. The alliance of the Long House with the English was one of the factors that helped to turn the scale in their favor in the long contest for balance of power which the years brought about between France and England in the New World.

On this very same day of July, 1609, while Champlain’s arquebus was frightening the solitudes of this leafy part of the wild New World, a little vessel known as the Half Moon was in anchor on the New England coast while the carpenter fitted a new foremast. A few Weeks later the Half Moon was in the Hudson and had come to anchor above present Troy in the precincts over which the warriors of the Long House kept watch. Thus does the Muse of History play different parts with two hands.

Time passed and French and Indian war parties again and again went by the point of land on which Ticonderoga now stands, bent on marauding and harrying the English villages. Lake Champlain and Lake George had become part of the great highway between French world and English world. Finally, in 1735, Crown Point, the fore-runner of Ticonderoga, was established by the French as an organized centre of power and an outpost thrown toward the English. Twenty years after this Ticonderoga came into prominence.

The year 1755 was a doleful one for the English colonies. It was the year of Braddock’s defeat. In January, Shirley, governor of Massachusetts, proposed an attack on Crown Point. The other colonies were taken with the idea and raised levies of men and funds. A heterogeneous army was the result under the leadership of William Johnson, of New York, with the rank of Major-general, separately bestowed upon him by each of the colonies taking part. His selection was due not only to his immense personal popularity but to his influence in the Long House of the Five Nations as well, no other white man of his time having so much authority with the dwellers in the forest. Of white men he had altogether about eight thousand and he had his Indian allies.

That in an army which included men from Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire there should be some bickering and disagreements was inevitable, but, at length, the column reached the foot of Lake George, which had become known to its French acquaintances as Lac le Sacrement. Now it received a new baptism. “I have given it the name of Lake George,” wrote Johnson to the Lords of Trade, “not only in honor of His Majesty but to ascertain (assert) his undoubted dominion here.” Lake George it has been ever since. A camp was made where, after a time, Fort William Henry was built, and a most unmilitary camp it was, if we can believe the accounts of contemporaries. Though a dense forest gave cover for an enemy to its very borders, no effort was made to clear away the trees. Painted Indians lounged around, traders squabbled together, and New England clergymen preached to the savages long Calvinistic sermons.

Meanwhile the French at Crown Point were preparing a surprise for Johnson. Large forces under the German Baron Dieskau had come up, and Dieskau had assumed command of the united troops. He had no thought of waiting to be attacked. He told his men to be in readiness to move at a moment’s notice. Officers were to take nothing with them but one spare shirt, one spare pair of shoes, a blanket, a bearskin and provisions for twelve days. The Indians were to make up their minds not to take scalps until the enemy had been entirely defeated, because the operation of taking a scalp was too lengthy a proceeding, and kept them from killing other men. Then Dieskau moved on to a promontory which commanded both Lake Champlain and Lake George. It was a high wooden mount with a magnificent view of the waters; in short, our old friend Ticonderoga.

The German baron for a time made camp here, the first formal military occupation of this point, but at length, being misinformed by an American prisoner, who had been threatened with torture, as to the force Johnson had, he prepared to move in haste and with deadly intent against the American colonials. News of Braddock’s defeat had just then become general information, and throughout the ranks of the ignorant white men of the French party and of all their savage allies ran an unwarranted contempt for English bravery based on accounts of that lamentable massacre. Dieskau left a part of his force at Ticonderoga, and embarking with the rest in canoes and bateaux made his way through the narrow southern part of Lake Champlain to where the town of Whitehall now stands, a point at which they pitched camp.

The close of the next day found them well on toward Johnson and on the day after that the battle of Lake George took place. It is unnecessary to go into detail about this. The first part of the day went against the Americans, who had foolishly sent out against Dieskau, when they received word of his approach, an insufficient number of white and red forces; but the end of the day found the Americans victorious. Dieskau was badly wounded and was a prisoner.

The story goes that a delegation of chiefs waited upon Johnson while Dieskau was in his cabin. The unwilling guest made some comment about them to his host after their departure. “Yes, they wish to be allowed to burn you,” was the response. Johnson took extraordinary pains that the French leader should not fall into the hands of his savages, and Dieskau died a peaceful death as a result of his wounds several years later, midst the civilization of Bath, England, whence he had gone in hopes of being benefited by the waters.

Johnson commenced now to build Fort William Henry at one end of Lake George, and the French, quickly recovering from their set-back, began building at the other end, on the site of Dieskau’s camp, the famous Fort Ticonderoga. The building of the French fort consumed the greater part of 1756 and 1757, and was consummated under the reign, in Canada, of Vaudreuil.

The original plan of Fort Ticonderoga was of a bastion fort, but afterwards star-shaped outer walls, following plans of the great Vauban, were added. The French built solidly in their various military works, and Fort Ticonderoga was an enduring and strong construction.

We have seen Fort William Henry and Fort Ticonderoga started as rivals. The survivor of these two was Ticonderoga, and the destruction of Fort William Henry was the occasion of one of the saddest and most horrible massacres in American history. In 1757 the Marquis de Montcalm, chief of the French king’s forces in Canada, was at Ticonderoga and with him was the Chevalier de Levis with about eight thousand regulars, Canadians and Indians. The troopers and the irregular forces were camped around the walls of Ticonderoga near the lake and in the rear of the fort where the eminence of land on which the fort stands continues in a gentle plateau before commencing its descent. A colorful, picturesque camp it was, with its red Indians, its half-breed whites, and its careless soldiery. The officers and gentlemen of consequence were lodged in the fort where they ate in the mess hall and lounged and smoked and drank at leisure.

With his eight thousand men Montcalm set forth on the first of August, 1757, across the little neck of land which divides Lake Champlain from Lake George, leaving a small detachment to hold the fort, and made his way along Lake George to near Fort William Henry. His Britannic Majesty’s stronghold was solidly built and was in command of a capable officer, Lieutenant Colonel Munro, a brave Scotchman, but its garrison was insufficient, and reinforcements were never sent. Montcalm attacked.

So well did the little band of beleaguered men contest their position, that when inevitably they surrendered very favorable terms were offered. It was agreed that the English troops should march out with the honors of war and be escorted to Fort Edward by a detachment of French troops; that they should not serve for eighteen months, and that all French prisoners captured in America since the war began should be given up within three months. The stores, munitions, and artillery were to be the prize of the victors, except that the garrison, in recognition of its bravery, was to retain one field-piece. The Indian chiefs were consulted in the making of these terms and agreed to them by shaking of the hands.

When the capitulation took place, a scene very different from that which had been anticipated was to be viewed. The Indians, excited by the presence of so many captives, as they considered the English prisoners of war, were not to be restrained and, though measures were taken to hold them in rein, fell upon the helpless men and women and butchered them mercilessly.

The morning after the massacre soldiers were set to work destroying all that remained of Fort William Henry.

The year that followed the massacre—1758—brought the most formidable looking and least effective of all of the attacks against Ticonderoga. The English, thoroughly incensed at the loss of Fort William Henry, had set themselves with determination to destroy Ticonderoga and to this end had raised a great force of regular soldiery, provincial militia and those invaluable irregular border troops of which Roger’s rangers are a good example, and had placed them under the command of General Abercrombie. The whole body lay encamped in June, 1758, at the head of Lake George, within easy striking distance of the terrible French stronghold. It numbered nearly fifteen thousand men, all told. Montcalm’s forces were not one-fourth so numerous and the great French leader was sadly sure of disaster to himself and his men.

That disaster did not, indeed, fall upon the French as the outcome of this undertaking on the part of the British is to be ascribed primarily to the unfortunate choice of a leader which they had had made for them and to Providence, which early in the campaign removed from their midst the only military talent which they seem to have possessed. Abercrombie was a political heritage of corrupt powers in England, where the government had undergone a great reconstruction since the horrors of Fort William Henry, and had been kept in authority solely on account of pressure which could be brought to bear at home. Lord Pitt had appointed as second in command of the expedition one of the few military geniuses of his age,—as all of his contemporaries admitted,—the young Lord Howe, elder brother of the more famous Sir William Howe, who later commanded His Majesty’s forces in America against the rebellious colonies. “The noblest Englishman that has appeared in my time and the best soldier in the British army,” said Wolfe, of him. In a minor skirmish at the very first of the reconnoitring around Ticonderoga he was killed by an Indian’s bullet, and the English troops were left to flounder on from one blunder to another.

The last part of the march against Ticonderoga was commenced on the morning of July 4 and by July 6 the soldiers were at the head of Lake George and in touch with the enemy in Ticonderoga just over a ridge of woods.

The ridge of land on which Ticonderoga is situated continues northwest without the sharp decline that marks its topography in every other direction. Along this spine, then, the English attack might be expected, so in this quarter Montcalm had had barriers built of fallen trees, laid together so as to form a zig-zag parapet nine feet in height and with a platform behind, from which the French soldiers might shoot without exposing themselves. Along the entire front of this barricade the ground was strewn with sharp-pointed boughs. Obviously it was not a position that infantry could take without the aid of artillery.

Yet, under Abercrombie’s command, the English advanced against this work without waiting for the cannon which they had with them to be brought up. Between noon and nightfall of July 7 they made six gallant assaults without result. A perfect hades of shot and flame those logs became. The scene has been described by one of Roger’s rangers who took part in the action, and his description, found in an old letter, was published a decade ago in Harper’s Magazine, by one of his descendants. “The maze of fallen trees with their withered leaves hanging broke their ranks and the French Retrenchment blazed fire and death” he wrote. “They advanced bravely up but all to no good purpose and hundreds there met their death. My dear Joseph I have the will but not the way to tell you all that I saw that awful afternoon. I have since been in many battles and skirmishes but I have never witnessed such slaughter and such wild fighting as the British storm of Ticonderoga. We became mixed up—Highlanders, Grenadiers, Light Troops, Rangers and all, and we beat against that mass of logs and maze of fallen timber and we beat in vain. I was once carried right up to the breastwork, but we were stopped by the bristling mass of sharpened branches, while the French fire swept us front and flank. The ground was covered deep with dying men and, as I think it over now, I can remember nothing but the fruit bourne by the tree of war, for I looked upon so many wondrous things that July day that I could not set them downe at all. We drew off after seeing that no human valour could take that work. We Rangers then skirmished with the French colony troops and the Canada Indians until dark while our people rescued the wounded, and then we fell back. The Army was utterly demoralized and made a headlong retreat during which many wounded men were left to die in the woods.”

On the day following his victory Montcalm had a great cross planted in the battle-field bearing words, composed by himself, which have been translated by Parkman as follows:

Soldier and chief and rampart’s strength are nought;

Behold the Conquering Cross! ’Tis God the triumph wrought.

The old fort was to fall into English hands the next year, however, when Amherst, commander-in-chief of the English forces in America, advanced against it with a force of British and Americans. Montcalm had hurried to the defence of Quebec with the greater part of his force and Ticonderoga was in the command of Boulemarque, a capable officer, but one no more able than any other man to accomplish the impossible. He could not hold the position with the inconsiderable force he had against that opposed to him. A stroke of Providence was not to be anticipated a second time. So, while the British encamped under the walls of the fort prepared to attack it the next day, Boulemarque set a fuse to the powder magazine and marched his men out. There was a great explosion and a rending of walls, and Ticonderoga’s besiegers knew that the fort was their prize.

The Mess Hall [top]
A Council Room
INTERIOR VIEWS OF FORT TICONDEROGA, N. Y.

Through the rest of the French and Indian War, which was from this time forward a tale of uninterrupted success for the British arms, Ticonderoga played no part except that of a garrisoned English possession. Its walls were repaired where Boulemarque’s match had shattered them.

The prestige of the fort had now become such that in the fermenting first days of the outbreak in the colonies against the Mother Country it was conceived that the seizure of the place would have an immense moral effect in the colonies. A sturdy Vermont man, Ethan Allen, with his Green Mountain boys, was given the task of seizing it. In early spring, 1775, Allen approached the old Indian stronghold now held by merely a handful of British, who had no idea that the Americans were in action against them. One cannot depreciate the tenacity of purpose and hardiness which carried Ethan Allen and his men through the inhospitable wilderness to success in their enterprise, but the military valor of the action was not great. With his men Allen crept up to the unsuspecting stronghold, seized the sentry, and, while his men scattered through the fort making prisoners of its inmates, thundered at the door of the commanding officer: “Open in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.” While knowing little of the Continental Congress, the officer submitted to the inevitable.

The news of Allen’s exploit was spread through the colonies and was a determining influence with many undecided Americans. His resounding phrase has been repeated by school-boys many times since and is perhaps more familiarly associated with the name of Ticonderoga than any of the great exploits which have marked its past.

For a time the Americans held on to the fort. In 1776 a large force was concentrated here, since it guarded that very vital means of access to the heart of the colonies which the British persistently tried to make use of. It was from this point that in 1776 Benedict Arnold set forth with a small fleet of vessels to attack Sir Guy Carleton at Valcour Island. Though the American fleet was almost entirely destroyed, it, nevertheless, set back the plans of the British one year and delayed their projected invasion from the north that long.

In 1777 Burgoyne invested the fort and, by dragging some guns to the top of Mount Defiance, an eminence which commands Ticonderoga, caused General Arthur St. Clair of the American forces to evacuate the place. Burgoyne occupied the fort for a passing visit but was soon on his way into the colonies by the ancient trail which war parties for generations had trod, fortunately, for the colonies, to meet defeat and loss of his army at the battle of Saratoga.

The fort remained in the hands of the British until after the surrender of Yorktown, though Colonel Brown of Massachusetts made a brave effort to take it once more. During the War of 1812 it listened to the guns of McDonough’s improvised fleet in action with the British, but it had no active part in this action or in this war, itself.

In 1806 the property on which the old fort stands was leased from Union and Columbia colleges by William F. Pell of New York, it being a part of a State grant to these institutions. Mr. Pell built a summer cottage for himself and, in 1816, purchased the land. The cottage was destroyed in 1825 and a second building known as the Pavilion was erected. The Pavilion is still in use and has never been out of the Pell family.

The walls of Ticonderoga, the fort, were not greatly prized by the early holders of this Pell tract and it remained for the present head of his generation, Mr. Stephen H. P. Pell, to appreciate the historic value of the old place and to set about a work of restoration and repair. The foundations of the walls were still solid and some of the old buildings were still standing when, in 1909, Mr. Pell began his work of rebuilding. The original plans of the fort were secured from the French government. The work of rehabilitation has been carried forward in strict accordance with authorities. Historic points in the grounds surrounding the fort have been marked with tablets and monuments and each year sees an increasing number of visitors coming to Ticonderoga to inspect this history-filled place.

[CROWN POINT]
LAKE CHAMPLAIN—NEW YORK

It would be hard, gazing upon Crown Point to-day, to realize the storms and terrors it let loose upon the English colonists not quite two hundred years ago. Girt by the smiling waters of one of America’s most beautiful lakes, overtopped by a verdant mountain, and gazing out upon green fields in the shade of majestic woodlands, all of the atmosphere of the place is one of peace and aloofness from the pain of human suffering. Yet the name “Crown Point” was a sinister thing in the early days of the English colonists, particularly in the northern provinces. The New England matron putting to bed her infant Stephen Brewster or little Praise-the-Lord Jones, or the Dutch vrouw in the country round about Albany with her little Van Rensselaer Tasselwitch, had but to utter this dreadful name, “Crown Point,” to bring her child into the most docile state of apprehension. From Crown Point went forth the scalping parties of French, Indian and half-breeds, which preyed upon the borders of the English colonies, carrying wrack and horror wherever they went. A glad and beautiful place, it nourished in its heart an evil spirit.

Where the flag flew [top]
The Ruined Barracks
CROWN POINT, N. Y., IN DEAD OF WINTER

The settlement of the Crown Point district by the French began soon after the opening of the eighteenth century. The beautiful lake which bears the name of its discoverer had been known in France for more than a century, and the country which lay between Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario—all that wilderness stretch of northern New York of to-day—had been charted with a fair degree of exactness, as well. The riches of the region were well sensed. Accordingly, a large and important province was planned by the French political geographers whose eastern boundary should be the Connecticut and whose western boundary should be Lake Ontario. North was the St. Lawrence River, and the southern confine was rather misty, except that it was determined that it should be all that could be kept from the English. The metropolis and capital of this fine project was to be a place situated at that peculiar bend in Lake Champlain where there was a projecting tongue of land, making a fine site for settlement, fortification and development. In other words, it was to be Crown Point, or Pointe de Couronne, as the French had it. A body of settlers was sent over about 1729, and in 1731 a fortification was commenced at the tip of the Crown Point peninsula which was named Fort Saint Frederic. The remains of this fortification are barely visible on the lake side of the point to-day near the Champlain Memorial light-house. And now a few words as to the geography of this part of Lake Champlain.

The lake, as all know, is a long, narrow tongue of water. About mid-way down it is constricted to even more than its usual slender width (“slender” as proportioned to the length) and the water is carried off at a sharp angle to the east. Just before the constriction, however, there is a protuberance, and on the west shore of this protuberance, or bay, there stands to-day the thriving little foundry town of Port Henry. Directly across the water from Port Henry, and at the point where the lake makes a sharp bend to the east, is a long, narrow point of land, and this is Crown Point. Crown Point has water on two sides of it. Though only a short distance from Port Henry by boat, it is quite a long distance by land, for, then, one must drive down to the base of the peninsula and work out to the point along the five-mile extent of the peninsula. The lake on the east side of Crown Point peninsula is so narrow that a cannon could easily fire across it. Behind Port Henry, that is, on the west side of the lake, is a precipitous mountain-side. The Point, therefore, was well protected in the days when cannon were with difficulty to be found in America and when they could not be transported easily through the wilderness of the New World. It could only be approached by water or by the long, narrow strip of land which joined it with the mainland, and either one of these approaches it could master very easily.

The first fort on Crown Point, Fort Saint Frederic, was a little five-pointed star-shaped fort. Though small in size, it played a far larger part in events than the mighty successor which the years brought and which we shall presently come to. Fort Saint Frederic was for twenty-five years the only French stronghold in this part of the world. In 1756 Ticonderoga was begun. In the council-rooms of old Saint Frederic what strange visitors might have been seen, what bizarre juxtapositions of Old World and New, of sophistication and savagery! During all of its life the little fort was a rendezvous for Indians. Here, too, the Baron Dieskau made himself at home before setting out on the expedition, unfortunate for himself, against Johnson on Lake George. Here might have been seen Montcalm and other of the mightiest and craftiest warriors of old France in the new.

Except as a centre for Indians and a council hall for white and red, the little fort did not ever take part in fighting. When the English finally advanced in force against the strongholds on Lake Champlain, Ticonderoga was the point which bore the brunt of the onslaughts. First, Johnson came against these two hornet nests of French and Indians and accomplished little. Then Abercrombie made his futile and disgraceful try (“Mother Nabercrombie” he was long afterward known in the colonies). Finally the two forts fell before the large force which Amherst, in 1757, brought against them and as a result of the need of men at Quebec which had depleted their strength beyond the power of resistance. Fort Saint Frederic, like Ticonderoga, was deserted without a shot being fired, though its departing commander tried to destroy it by fusing the magazines.