Hero Stories from American History Part 2

{19} This bold reply of the patriot soldier showed the hatred and the contempt in which Arnold was held by all true Americans; it also hints at an earlier fame which this strange and remarkable man had won in fighting the battles of his country.

Now that war with the mother country had begun, an attack upon Canada seemed to be an act of self-defense; for through the valley of the St. Lawrence the colonies to the south could be invaded. The "back door," as Canada was called, which was now open for such invasion, must be tightly shut. In fact it was believed that Sir Guy Carleton, the governor of Canada, was even now trying to get the Indians to sweep down the valley of the Hudson, to harry the New England frontier.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Washington Elm in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, under which Washington took Command]

Meanwhile, under the old elm in Cambridge, Washington had taken command of the Continental army. Shortly afterwards he met Benedict Arnold for the first time. The great Virginian found the young officer a man after his own heart. Arnold was at this time captain of the best-drilled and best-equipped company that the patriot army could boast. {20} He had already proved himself a man of energy and of rare personal bravery.

Before his meeting with Washington, Arnold had hurried spies into Canada to find out the enemy's strength; and he had also sent Indians with wampum, to make friends with the redskins along the St.

Lawrence. Some years before, he had been to Canada to buy horses; and through his friends in Quebec and in Montreal he was now able to get a great deal of information, which he promptly sent to Congress.

Congress voted to send out an expedition. An army was to enter Canada by the way of the Kennebec and Chaudiere rivers; there to unite forces with Montgomery, who had started from Ticonderoga; and then, if possible, to surprise Quebec.

The patriot army of some eighteen thousand men was at this time engaged in the siege of Boston. During the first week in September, orders came to draft men for Quebec. For the purpose of carrying the troops up the Kennebec River, a force of carpenters was sent ahead to build two hundred bateaux, or flat-bottomed boats. To Arnold, as colonel, was given the command of the expedition. For the sake of avoiding any ill feeling, the officers were allowed to draw lots. So eager were the troops to share in the possible glories of the campaign that several thousand at once volunteered.

About eleven hundred men were chosen, the very flower of the Continental army. More than one half of {21} these came from New England; three hundred were riflemen from Pennsylvania and from Virginia, among whom were Daniel Morgan and his famous riflemen from the west bank of the Potomac.

On September 13, the little army left Cambridge and marched through Ess.e.x to Newburyport. The good people of this old seaport gave the troops an ovation, on their arrival Sat.u.r.day night. They escorted them to the churches on Sunday, and on Tuesday morning bade them good-by, "with colors flying, drums and fifes playing, the hills all around being covered with pretty girls weeping for their departing swains."

On the following Thursday, with a fair wind, the troops reached the mouth of the Kennebec, one hundred and fifty miles away. Working their way up the river, they came to anchor at what is now the city of Gardiner. Near this place, the two hundred bateaux had been hastily built of green pine. The little army now advanced six miles up the river to Fort Western, opposite the present city of Augusta.

Here they rested for three days, and made ready for the ascent of the Kennebec.

An old journal tells us that the people who lived near prepared a grand feast for the soldiers, with three bears roasted whole in frontier fashion, and an abundance of venison, smoked salmon, and huge pumpkin pies, all washed down with plenty of West India rum.

Among the guests at this frontier feast was a half-breed Indian girl named Jacataqua, who had fallen in {22} love with a handsome young officer of the expedition. This officer was Aaron Burr, who afterwards became Vice President of the United States. When the young visitor found that the wives of two riflemen, James Warner and Sergeant Grier, were going to tramp to Canada with the troops, she, too, with some of her Indian friends, made up her mind to go with them. This trifling incident, as we shall see later, saved the lives of many brave men.

The season was now far advanced. There must be no delay, or the early Canadian winter would close in upon them. The little army was divided into four divisions. On September 25, Daniel Morgan and his riflemen led the advance, with orders to go with all speed to what was called the Twelve Mile carrying place. The second division, under the command of Colonel Greene, started the next day. Then came the third division, under Major Meigs, while Colonel Enos brought up the rear.

There were fourteen companies, each provided with sixteen bateaux.

These boats were heavy and clumsy. When loaded, four men could hardly haul or push them through the shallow channels, or row them against the strong current of the river. It was hard and rough work. And those dreadful carrying places! Before they reached Lake Megantic, they dragged these boats, or what was left of them, round the rapids twenty-four times. At each carrying place, kegs of powder and of bullets, barrels of {23} flour and of pork, iron kettles, and all manner of camp baggage had to be unpacked from the boats, carried round on the men's backs, and reloaded again. Sometimes the "carry"

was only a matter of a few rods, and again it was two miles long.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Map of Arnold's Route to Quebec]

From the day the army left Norridgewock, the last outpost of civilization, troubles came thick and fast. Water from the leaky boats spoiled the dried codfish and most of the flour. The salt beef was found unfit for use. There was now nothing left to eat but flour and pork. The all-day exposure in water, the chilling river fogs at night, and the sleeping in uniforms which were frozen stiff even in front of the camp fires, all began to thin the ranks of these st.u.r.dy backwoodsmen.

On October 12, Colonel Enos and the rear guard reached the Twelve Mile carrying place. The army that had set out from Fort Western with nearly twelve hundred men could now muster only nine hundred and fifty well men. And yet they were only beginning the most perilous stage of their journey. All about them stood the dark and silent wilderness, through which they were to make their way for sixteen miles, to reach the Dead River. In this dreaded route there were four carrying places. The last was three miles long, a third of which was a miry spruce and cedar swamp. It took {24} five days of hardest toil to cut their way through the unbroken wilderness. Fortunately, the hunters shot four moose and caught plenty of salmon trout.

Now began the snail-like advance for eighty-six miles up the crooked course of the Dead River. Sometimes they cut their way through the thickets and the underbrush, but oftener they waded along the banks.

Then came a heavy rainstorm, which grew into a hurricane during the night. The river overflowed its banks for a mile or more on either side. Many of the boats sank or were dashed to pieces. Barrels of pork and of flour were swept away. For the next ten days, these heroic men seemed to be pressing forward to a slow death by starvation. Each man's ration was reduced to half a pint of flour a day.

The old adage tells us that misfortunes never come singly. The rear guard under Colonel Enos, with its trail hewn out for it, had carried the bulk of the supplies; but, after losing most of the provisions in the freshet, he refused any more flour for his half-starved comrades at the front.

On October 25, the rear guard having caught up with Greene's division, which was in the worst plight of all, encamped at a place called Ledge Falls. At a council of war held in the midst of a driving snowstorm, Enos himself voted at first to go forward; but afterwards he decided to go back. So the rear guard, grudgingly giving up two barrels of flour, turned their backs, and, {25} in spite of the jeers and the threats of their comrades, started home.

Greene and his brave fellows showed no signs of faltering, but, as a diary reads, "took each man his duds to his back, bid them adieu, and marched on."

Just over the boundary between Maine and Canada there was a great swamp. In this bog two companies lost their way, and waded knee-deep in the mire for ten miles in endless circles. Reaching a little hillock after dark, they stood up all night long to keep from freezing. Each man was for himself in the struggle for life. The strong dared not halt to help the weak for fear they too should perish.

"Alas! alas!" writes one soldier, "these horrid spectacles! my heart sickens at the recollection."

That each man might fully realize how little food was left, a final division was made of the remaining provisions. Five pints of flour were given to each man! This must last him for a hundred miles through the pathless wilderness, a tramp of at least six days. In the ashes of the camp fire, each man baked his flour, Indian fashion, into five little cakes. Though the officers coaxed and threatened, some of the poor frantic fellows ate all their cakes at one meal.

On November 2, our little army, scattered for more than forty miles along the banks of the Chaudiere River, was still dragging out its weary way. Tents, boats, and camp supplies were all gone, except here and there a tin camp kettle or an ax. A rifleman tells us that one day {26} he roasted and chewed his shot pouch, and adds, "in a short time there was not a shot pouch to be seen among all those in my view." For four days this man had not eaten anything except a squirrel skin, which he had picked up some days before.

Several dogs that had faithfully followed their masters were now killed and roasted; and even their feet, skin, and entrails were eaten. Captain Dearborn tells us how downcast he was when he was forced to kill and eat his fine Newfoundland dog. He writes, "we even pounded up the dog's bones and made broth for another meal."

A dozen men, who had been left behind to die, caught a stray horse that had run away from some settlement. They shot it and ate heartily of the flesh while they rested, and at last reached the main army.

For seven days these men had had nothing for food but roots and black birch bark.

The Indian girl Jacataqua, with a pet dog, still followed the troops.

She proved herself of the greatest service as a guide. She knew, also, about roots and herbs, and these she prepared in Indian fashion for the sick and the injured. The men did not dare to kill her dog, for she threatened to leave them to their fate if they harmed the faithful animal.

At one place James Warner, whose wife Jemima was marching with the troops, lagged behind, and, before his wife knew it, sank exhausted.

The faithful woman ran back alone, and stayed with him until he died.

She {27} buried him with leaves; and then, taking his musket and girding on his cartridge belt, she hurried breathless and panting for twenty miles, until she caught up with the troops. And as for Sergeant Grier's good wife, she tramped and starved her way with the men. No wonder that one writer, a boy of seventeen at the time, says, as he saw this plucky woman wading through the rivers, "My mind was humbled, yet astonished at the exertions of this good woman."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Arnold's Men marching through the Flooded Wilderness]

Where was the bold commander all this time, the man who was to lead these st.u.r.dy riflemen to easy victory? After paddling thirteen miles across Lake Megantic, {28} Arnold performed one of those brilliant and reckless deeds for which he was noted. Perhaps no other man in the American army would have dared to do what he did. The remnant of his famishing soldiers must be saved, and the time was short.

On October 28, he started down the swollen Chaudiere River with only a few men and without a guide. Sartigan, the nearest French settlement where provisions could be bought, was nearly seventy miles away. The swift current carried the frail canoes down the first twenty miles in two hours. Here through the rapids, there over hidden ledges, now escaping the driftwood and the sharp-edged rocks, Arnold and his men wrestled with the angry river.

At one place they plunged over a fall, and every canoe was capsized.

Six of the men found themselves swimming in a large rock-bound basin, while the angry flood thundered thirty feet over the ledges just beyond them. The men swam ash.o.r.e, thankful to escape death.

The last twenty miles was tramped through the wilderness, but such was the energy of their leader that Sartigan was reached on the evening of the second day. Long before daybreak, cattle and bags of flour were ready, and, with a relief party of French Canadians on horseback, Arnold was on his way back to the starving army.

Four days later, from the famished men in the frozen wilderness was heard far and wide the joyful cry, "Provisions!" "Provisions!"

{29} The cry was echoed from hill to hill, and along the snow-covered banks of the great river. The grim fight for life was over. They had won. How like a pack of famished wolves did they kill, cook, and devour the cattle!

The next day, two companies dashed through the icy waters of the Du Loup River, and, shortly afterwards, greeted with cheers the first house they had seen for thirty days. Six miles beyond, was Sartigan,--a half dozen log cabins and a few Indian wigwams.

A snowstorm now set in, but the joyful men hastily built huts of pine boughs, kindled huge camp fires, and waited for the stragglers. The severe Canadian winter was well begun. It kept on snowing heavily. As Quebec might be reenforced at any moment, every captain was ordered to get his men over the remaining fifty-four miles with all possible speed.

"Quebec!" "Quebec!" was in everybody's mouth.

Five days later, on November 9, the patriots reached Point Levi, a little French village opposite Quebec. The people looked on with astonishment as they straggled out of the woods, a worn-out army of perhaps six hundred men, with faces haggard, clothing in tatters, and many barefooted and bareheaded. Over eighty had died in the wilderness, and a hundred were on the sick list. So pitiful and so ludicrous was their appearance that one man wrote in his diary that they "resembled those animals of New Spain called {30} orang-outangs," and "unlike the children of Israel, whose clothes waxed not old in the wilderness, theirs hardly held together."

With his usual bravado, Arnold planned to capture the "Gibraltar of America" at one stroke. He little knew that, a few days before, some treacherous Indians had warned the British commander of his approach.

On the night of November 13, Arnold ferried five hundred of his men across the St. Lawrence, and climbed to the Heights of Abraham, at the very place where Wolfe had climbed to victory sixteen years before. At daybreak the walls of the city were covered with soldiers and with citizens. Within half a mile of the walls, which fairly bristled with cannon, the ragged soldiers halted and began to cheer l.u.s.tily. The redcoats shouted back their defiance. Arnold wrote a letter to the governor of Quebec, demanding the surrender of the city. The bearer of the letter, although under a flag of truce, was not even allowed to come near the walls.

After six days the little army slipped away one dark night, and tramped to a village some twenty miles to the west of Quebec. Here they hoped to join forces with Montgomery, who had already captured Montreal, and then come back to renew the siege.

Ten days later, on December 1, Arnold paraded his troops in front of the village church to greet Montgomery with his army. The united forces, still less than a thousand men, now trudged their way back to Quebec. On {31} arriving there, Montgomery boldly demanded the surrender of the town.

Meanwhile, on November 19, Sir Guy Carleton had left Montreal, and, having made his way down the river, in the disguise of a farmer, slipped into Quebec. This was the salvation of Canada.