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Updated: June 22, 2025
Captain Contrecoeur, an alert officer, had embarked about a thousand men with field-pieces, in a fleet of sixty bateaux and three hundred canoes, dropped down the river from Venango, and suddenly made his appearance before the fort, on which the men were working, and which was not half completed.
Thus it happened that to these Indians was left the entire guarding of the southern approaches to Detroit; and when, at the end of July, a strong detachment of troops in twenty-two bateaux, under command of Captain Dalzell, appeared at the mouth of the river, they having just concluded their treaty of peace, allowed it to pass up unmolested.
At the mouth of the river, he joined forces with Blennerhassett, who had left his island in haste just as the Ohio militia was about to descend upon him. The combined strength of the flotilla was nine bateaux carrying less than sixty men.
"The fine, rich people that would come up in bateaux from Montreal to visit my father had the smile and the kind word for Godfrey; but they looked upon us with the eyes of the white man for the Indian. And that look we were more and more sure was growing harder in Godfrey's eyes.
It was now April, and for some days Malachi and John had been very busy, assisted by the Strawberry; for the time had come for tapping the maple-trees, to make the maple-sugar, and Mrs. Campbell had expressed a wish that she could be so supplied with an article of such general consumption, and which they could not obtain but by the bateaux which went to Montreal.
His contingent was divided into two sections, possibly as soon as it emerged from the St Mary's river and entered Whitefish Bay. Selkirk himself sped forward with the less cumbersome craft, while the soldier-settlers advanced more leisurely in their bateaux. Early in August the vanguard came within sight of the islands that bar the approach to Thunder Bay.
The Captain then took leave of his friends with mutual regret, and many kind adieux, and, accompanied by the whole of the family to the beach, embarked with all his men and pulled away for the fort. The Campbells remained for some time on the shore of the lake watching the receding bateaux until they turned round the point and were hidden from their sight, and then they walked back to the house.
They form the kernel of the "distinctively and intensely American stock who were the pioneers of the axe and the rifle, succeeding the French pioneers of the sword and the bateaux."
Day in and day out, they labored with the bateaux and canoes, fought mosquitoes and other kindred pests, or sweated and swore at the portages. Severe toil like this lays a man naked to the very roots of his soul, and ere Lake Athabasca was lost in the south, each member of the party had hoisted his true colors. The two shirks and chronic grumblers were Carter Weatherbee and Percy Cuthfert.
Behind them all came the bateaux, loaded with stores and baggage, and the heavy flatboats that carried the artillery, while a rear-guard of provincials and regulars closed the long procession.
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