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Updated: June 21, 2025
The leader and his waiter kept apart and continued the purification three days longer, and the ceremony closed. He observed, that when their war-parties returned from an expedition, and had arrived near their village, they followed their file leader, in what is called Indian file, one by one, each a few yards behind the other, to give the procession an appearance of greater length and dignity.
Morning brought tidings that the war-parties were seen only seven miles away at sunrise; and in the presence of the common foe the major, for the time being, put aside the matter weighing so heavily on his mind, but not for a moment could he forget her startled face as he threw open that door. It was time indeed to look the situation squarely through and through.
Bourlamaque had been there since May with the battalions of Béarn and Royal Roussillon, finishing the fort, sending out war-parties, and trying to discover the force and designs of the English at Fort William Henry. Ticonderoga is a high rocky promontory between Lake Champlain on the north and the mouth of the outlet of Lake George on the south.
Troops were detailed to guard the settlers at their work in the fields, and officers and men were enjoined to use the utmost vigilance. Nevertheless, the Iroquois war-parties broke in at various points, burning and butchering, and spreading such terror that in some districts the fields were left untilled and the prospects of the harvest ruined.
A strong fort of stone was built, the abandoned cannon of Casco mounted on its walls, and sixty men placed in garrison. The keen military eye of Frontenac saw the danger involved in the re-establishment of Pemaquid. Lying far in advance of the other English stations, it barred the passage of war-parties along the coast, and was a standing menace to the Abenakis. It was resolved to capture it.
Their war-parties ranged the country from the northern English posts on the Slave Lake down south to the very borders of the Shoshones, and many among them had taken scalps of the Osages, near the Mississippi, and even of the great Pawnees. Between the Red River and the Platte they had once one hundred villages, thousands and thousands of horses. They numbered more than six thousand warriors.
They had been told by Big White that war-parties never encumbered themselves with women, and the jaded condition of the young people's horses to some extent allayed their fears, for it was evident the Indians had made a long and severe journey.
As the furnishing of provisions and transportation depended on that body, they could stop the movement of troops and defeat the Governor's military plans at their pleasure. He urged upon them the necessity of building forts on the two carrying-places between the Hudson and Lakes George and Champlain, thus blocking the path of war-parties from Canada.
When the commissioners to the southern Indians wrote to Lord George Germain, "we have been indefatigable in our endeavors to keep up a constant succession of parties of Indians to annoy the rebels," the writers must have well known, what the king's ministers should also have made it their business to know, that the war-parties whom they thus boasted of continually sending against the settlements directed their efforts mainly, indeed almost exclusively, not against bodies of armed men, but against the husbandmen as they unsuspectingly tilled the fields, and against the women and children who cowered helplessly in the log-cabins.
Canada was wild with alarm at reports of English preparation. There were about fifty English prisoners in barracks at Quebec, and every device was tried to get information from them; but being chiefly rustics caught on the frontiers by Indian war-parties, they had little news to give, and often refused to give even this.
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