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Fort St. Frederic on Lake Champlain had long been the source of Indian raids in New York because there were no forts between it and Albany. When Major General Edward Braddock arrived to oversee a four pronged attack on Canada, including an expedition against Fort St. Frederic, Lieutenant Governor James De Lancey of New York urged the construction of forts at Wood Creek and the south end of Lac St. Sacrement to block future raids. Superintendent of Indian Affairs William Johnson was given command of the campaign against Fort St. Frederic but his experience was limited to organizing and supplying Indian war parties that moved quickly. Now, he had to lead his Iroquois allies and 4,400 provincial soldiers to carve out a road, build several forts to protect the road, cross a lake and then besiege a French fort. Since the colonists had no experience with European campaigns, Captain William Eyre, a military engineer, was assigned to handle the logistics and engineering side of the campaign.

Johnson called a conference of the Iroquois nations, traditional allies of the British, at his estate in late June, but found that only the Mohawks were enthusiastic supporters of the campaign. The situation was greatly complicated by Massachusetts Governor Shirley’s competition for Iroquois recruits for his campaign against Fort Niagara, while both commanders fought fiercely for supplies and wagons, so construction of the road from Albany to Fort Edward, the first fort, did not start until late July. Delays caused by the complex nature of the plan enabled the French to reinforce Fort St. Frederic and increased the danger of disease among the militia, especially given the lack of supplies and cooking equipment.

News of the slaughter of Braddock’s army at Monongahela on July 9 and the abandonment of the Duquesne campaign further weakened morale, as well as reduced the Iroquois desire to help the English. Johnson attempted to train his militia like regulars but they were used to doing things their own way, since the previous three wars had been fought without much support from regular troops. They also had little patience with the campaign’s limited objectives and the European code of honor because they had grown up fighting a war of extermination against Indians.

Repeated reports of French reinforcements to Fort St. Frederic caused Johnson and his senior officers to modify the original plan on August 22. Messages were sent asking for 3,000 reinforcements and the objective was changed to building Fort Edward at the main portage, and a road to the southern end of Lac St. Sacrement with Fort William Henry at the end of the road. An assault would be launched against Fort St. Frederic if reinforcements arrived in time, but this was extremely unlikely since the campaign season was almost over. Otherwise, the fort would block French and Indian raids on the frontier and prevent the French from using the road for an attack on Fort Edward, since the seventy mile long road pointed directly at Albany.

When Johnson and the advance force of 1,500 men reached Lac St. Sacrement in late August, he renamed it Lake George, and the men began clearing the site where Fort William Henry would be constructed. By September 3, most of the army and the artillery had arrived at Lake George, leaving only 500 men, half of whom were workmen, to finish building Fort Edward. At this point, Johnson’s army was at its most vulnerable, since one fort was half finished and work on the other had just started. When Indian scouts discovered that large groups of the enemy were in the area, a warning was sent to Fort Edward, which had been reinforced by 400 militia from New Hampshire.

The enemy seen by the Indians were fifteen hundred men, mainly Indians and Canadian militia, with two hundred regulars under Marechal de camp Jean-Armand, Baron de Dieskau, who had reached Quebec City with six battalions of French regulars in late June.  Dieskau had originally planned to attack Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario, but in mid-August he was diverted with three thousand men to prevent an English attack against Fort St. Frederic. While the English colonies were much more populous than the French colony, the unified command structure in Canada meant that armies could be raised much faster. Although a formally trained European officer, Dieskau immediately embraced guerrilla warfare because he had served with Marechal de Saxe during the 1740s when Saxe had successfully employed irregular cavalry and skirmishers.

Learning from scouts and captured prisoners that most of Johnson’s army was at Lake George, Dieskau decided to leave fifteen hundred men, including five hundred regulars, at Carillon, near the north end of the lake where it meets Wood Creek, and lead the remainder to attack Fort Edward. By September 7, the force was only a couple of miles away from the fort and even though the garrison had been reinforced Dieskau was not concerned because everyone was still living in tents outside the incomplete fort.

Unfortunately, the Iroquois contingent refused to attack the fort because it was a fort, unfinished or not. Dieskau knew that Johnson had been alerted but the Indians were only willing to attack the encampment at Lake George so he had little choice but to grit his teeth and agree. They were moving up the road when scouts reported that an enemy force was approaching from the direction of Lake George. Dieskau decided to ambush them at a narrow ravine four miles from the lake, and the Canadians and Indians were placed on either side of the ravine with the regulars at the south end of the ravine.

Colonel Ephraim Williams had been sent with a thousand men to reinforce Fort Edward, and although a British army had been slaughtered only two months earlier, he had apparently not accepted the need to guard against ambush. The men were marching along without any flanking parties to flush out a potential ambush, while the small group of Iroquois with him were walking in front of the column, led by chief Theyanoguin, instead of scouting the area. Actually, this saved the majority of the men since when the Mohawks allied to the French saw Theyanoguin, they warned him and he began calling for the Mohawks to abandon the French until someone, most likely a French officer, silenced him with a bullet. The trap was sprung but it only caught the Iroquois and the leading elements of the militia column. Roughly thirty of the Mohawks were killed but the rest managed to help cover the retreat. Williams died while leading troops up the embankment to fight the enemy and his regiment lost most of its officers, so the men broke and fled back to Johnson’s camp. By the time the French regulars arrived, the militia had already escaped.

Dieskau was quickly learning to dislike working with Indians. They had refused to assault a garrison with an unfinished fort, screwed up a supposedly perfect ambush and now balked at attacking Johnson’s fortified camp, even though they had originally chosen it as a target. The Canadians followed the Indians’ lead, or rather refused to attack without their active participation, so Dieskau lost a precious opportunity to follow the flood of fleeing provincial soldiers into the camp. As he was attempting to persuade the Indians to fight, Johnson had time to further strengthen the rough breastwork of logs with wagons and boats, and organize the retreating militia, while Captain Eyre moved four cannon to cover the road.

Dieskau was not one to give up so he ordered the Indians and Canadians to keep the militia busy while his two hundred regulars attempted to force their way through cannon and musket fire to knock out the artillery. If the American militia had been standing on an open field his plan might have worked but the militia were more confident behind a barricade and a third of the regulars were casualties when the attack against the camp was finally called off after four hours. By that time Dieskau himself was severely wounded, so he was left leaning on a tree when his men retreated.

Grateful that they had survived what could have been a disaster, Johnson’s men made no effort to pursue the enemy but the men at Fort Edward heard the firing and sent two hundred militiamen as reinforcements for Johnson. The men were moving through the ravine when they surprised a large force of Canadians and Indians looting the dead from the ambush and sent them running. Even so, the French made it back to Carillon on September 11 without any serious pursuit. However, instead of raising morale, the provincials only wanted to stay in the protected area of the camp and refused to seek out the enemy. Part of the problem was that all of Johnson’s Indian allies left soon after the battle. It had been a bloody encounter for both sides. The provincial troops lost 223 dead and 108 wounded, while the French lost 149 dead, 163 wounded and 27 captured.

Shirley was happy to hear of the victory but wanted Johnson to continue with the original plan of eliminating Fort St. Frederic since Fort William Henry only blocked one approach to Albany. However, Johnson refused to do anything other than finish building the fort. Although reinforcements had arrived, there were not enough wagons to keep the men fed, and rangers led by Robert Rogers had discovered that the French were constructing a solid fort at Carillon.

Unfortunately, even building a fort produced arguments. Johnson and Eyre wanted a fort that could stand up to artillery but the militia were unwilling to do the digging needed to build anything other than a simple stockade. Another factor was that the New England militia had little interest in building a fort that protected New York, while a large fort required a large garrison, which would be costly to maintain. After a great deal of persuasion, the militia commanders finally agreed to build a fort that could hold five hundred men. Most important, such a fort would be able to bear cannon, so it could resist a determined assault long enough to be reinforced.

The reluctance of the soldiers assigned to construct the fort was understandable since it was built mainly with shovels. Dirt from a thirty foot wide ditch was used to build a thirty foot high wall that was ten feet thick with the guns mounted on top of the wall. The dirt was held in on either side by logs tied together but while this type of construction was solid, it was not durable and the wood was likely to rot within a few years. Each of the four corners had a bastion and parapets ran along the walls to provide protection for the men and the cannon. In short, this was not your average frontier fort. The main problem was that the walls were not high enough to block fire from higher hills to the east and southwest. The fort was in usable condition by November 13 and the main army marched home on November 27, leaving garrisons to hold Fort William Henry and Fort Edward in preparation for next year’s campaign.

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Further Reading:

Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the Massacre-Ian K. Steele, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Steele uses the experience of an English colonist who was abducted along with her family by the Abenaki to show that the Indians viewed taking captives for resale as an integral part of their society and economy. In fact, it was a thriving industry since if the captives were able to raise the money then they would be freed, if not they were purchased by well-off Canadians either as laborers or to be raised as part of a new family. Oddly enough, the Abenaki were devout and deferential towards a Jesuit missionary who lived in their town but apparently made no effort to prevent the habit of taking prisoners. It is a very well researched book that excels at explaining how the principal actors saw the situation at the time and why they made their decisions. An entire chapter is devoted to determining how many prisoners were taken by the Indians following the surrender at Fort William Henry and how many were freed by the French, as well as how many escaped to finally return home. Steele concludes with a chapter that examines in detail how the massacre has been perceived, showing how Montcalm’s refusal to acknowledge responsibility was accepted for two centuries.

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