Montcalm and Wolfe: The Riveting Story of the Heroes of the French & Indian War (52 page)

A few weeks later Hebecourt had his revenge. About the middle of March a report came to Montreal that a large party of rangers had been cut to pieces a few miles from Ticonderoga, and that Rogers himself was among the slain. This last announcement proved false; but the rangers had suffered a crushing defeat. Colonel Haviland, commanding at Fort Edward, sent a hundred and eighty of them, men and officers, on a scouting party towards Ticonderoga; and Captain Pringle and Lieutenant Roche, of the twenty-seventh regiment, joined them as volunteers, no doubt through a love of hardy adventure, which was destined to be fully satisfied. Rogers commanded the whole. They passed down Lake George on the ice under cover of night, and then, as they neared the French outposts, pursued their way by land behind Rogers Rock and the other mountains of the western shore. On the preceding day, the twelfth of March, Hebecourt had received a reinforcement of two hundred Mission Indians and a body of Canadians. The Indians had no sooner arrived than, though nominally Christians, they consulted the spirits, by whom they were told that the English were coming. On this they sent out scouts, who came back breathless, declaring that they had found a great number of snow-shoe tracks. The superhuman warning being thus confirmed, the whole body of Indians, joined by a band of Canadians and a number of volunteers from the regulars, set out to meet the approaching enemy, and took their way up the valley of Trout Brook, a mountain gorge that opens from the west upon the valley of Ticonderoga.

Towards three o’clock on the afternoon of that day Rogers had reached a point nearly west of the mountain that bears his name. The rough and rocky ground was buried four feet in snow, and all around stood the gray trunks of the forest, bearing aloft their skeleton arms and tangled intricacy of leafless twigs.
Close on the right was a steep hill, and at a little distance on the left was the brook, lost under ice and snow. A scout from the front told Rogers that a party of Indians was approaching along the bed of the frozen stream, on which he ordered his men to halt, face to that side, and advance cautiously. The Indians soon appeared, and received a fire that killed some of them and drove back the rest in confusion.

Not suspecting that they were but an advance-guard, about half the rangers dashed in pursuit, and were soon met by the whole body of the enemy. The woods rang with yells and musketry. In a few minutes some fifty of the pursuers were shot down, and the rest driven back in disorder upon their comrades. Rogers formed them all on the slope of the hill; and here they fought till sunset with stubborn desperation, twice repulsing the overwhelming numbers of the assailants, and thwarting all their efforts to gain the heights in the rear. The combatants were often not twenty yards apart, and sometimes they were mixed together. At length a large body of Indians succeeded in turning the right flank of the rangers. Lieutenant Phillips and a few men were sent by Rogers to oppose the movement; but they quickly found themselves surrounded, and after a brave defence surrendered on a pledge of good treatment. Rogers now advised the volunteers, Pringle and Roche, to escape while there was time, and offered them a sergeant as guide; but they gallantly resolved to stand by him. Eight officers and more than a hundred rangers lay dead and wounded in the snow. Evening was near and the forest was darkening fast, when the few survivors broke and fled. Rogers with about twenty followers escaped up the mountain; and gathering others about him, made a running fight against the Indian pursuers, reached Lake George, not without fresh losses, and after two days of misery regained Fort Edward with the remnant of his band. The enemy on their part suffered heavily, the chief loss falling on the Indians; who, to revenge themselves, murdered all the wounded and nearly all the prisoners, and tying Lieutenant Phillips and his men to trees, hacked them to pieces.

Captain Pringle and Lieutenant Roche had become separated from the other fugitives; and, ignorant of woodcraft, they wandered by moonlight amid the desolation of rocks and snow, till early in the night they met a man whom they knew as a servant of Rogers, and who said that he could guide them to Fort Edward. One of them had lost his snow-shoes in the fight; and, crouching over a miserable fire of broken sticks, they worked till morning to make a kind of substitute with forked branches, twigs, and a few leather strings. They had no hatchet to cut firewood, no blankets, no overcoats, and no food except part of a Bologna sausage and a little ginger which Pringle had brought with him. There was no game; not even a squirrel was astir; and their chief sustenance was juniper-berries and the inner bark of trees. But their worst calamity was the helplessness of their guide. His brain wandered; and while always insisting that he knew the country well, he led them during four days hither and thither among a labyrinth of nameless mountains, clambering over rocks, wading through snowdrifts, struggling among fallen trees, till on the fifth day they saw with despair that they had circled back to their own starting-point. On the next morning, when they were on the ice of Lake George, not far from Rogers Rock, a blinding storm of sleet and snow drove in their faces. Spent as they were, it was death to stop; and bending their heads against the blast, they fought their way forward, now on the ice, and now in the adjacent forest, till in the afternoon the storm ceased, and they found themselves on the bank of an unknown stream. It was the outlet of the lake; for they had wandered into the valley of Ticonderoga, and were not three miles from the French fort. In crossing the torrent Pringle lost his gun, and was near losing his life. All three of the party were drenched to the skin; and, becoming now for the first time aware of where they were, they resolved on yielding themselves prisoners to save their lives. Night, however, again found them in the forest. Their guide became delirious, saw visions of Indians all around, and, murmuring incoherently, straggled off a little way, seated himself in the snow, and was soon dead. The two officers, themselves but half alive, walked all night round a tree to keep the blood in motion. In the morning, again toiling on, they presently saw the fort across the intervening snowfields, and approached it, waving a white handkerchief. Several French officers dashed towards them at full speed, and reached them in time to save them from the clutches of the Indians, whose camps were near at hand. They were kindly treated, recovered from the effects of their frightful ordeal, and were afterwards exchanged. Pringle lived to old age, and died in 1800, senior major-general of the British army.
¹

Notes - 1

1
Loudon to Webb,
20
Aug
. 1757.
Loudon to Holdernesse,
Oct
. 1757.
Loudon to Pownall,
16 [18?]
Aug
. 1757. A passage in this last letter, in which Loudon says that he shall, if prevented by head-winds from getting into New York, disembark the troops on Long Island, is perverted by that ardent partisan, William Smith, the historian of New York, into the absurd declaration “that he should encamp on Long Island for the defence of the continent.”

Notes - 2

1
Delancey to
[
Holdernesse?
], 24
Aug
. 1757.

2
Captain Christie to Governor Wentworth,
11
Aug
. 1757.
Ibid
.,
to Governor Pownall, same date
.

3
Smith,
Hist
.
N.Y
., Part II. 254.

Notes - 3

1
“En chemin faisant et même en entrant à Montréal ils les ont mangés et fait manger aux autres prisonniers.”
Bigot au Ministre,
24
Août,
1757.
“Des sauvages ont fait manger aux mères la chair de leurs enfants.”
Jugement impartial sur les Opérations militaires en Canada
. A French diary kept in Canada at this time, and captured at sea, is cited by Hutchinson as containing similar statements.

2
One of these corpses was that of Richard Rogers, brother of the noted partisan Robert Rogers. He had died of small-pox some time before. Rogers,
Journals,
55,
note
.

3
Vaudreuil au Ministre,
15
Sept
. 1757.

4
Mémoires sur le Canada,
1749-1760.

5
Dépêches de Vaudreuil,
1757.

Notes - 4

1
Loudon to Pitt,
14
Feb
. 1758.
Vaudreuil au Ministre,
12
Fév
. 1758.
Ibid
., 28
Nov
. 1758. Bougainville,
Journal
.
Summary of M. de Belêtre’s Campaign,
in
N.Y. Col. Docs
., X. 672. Extravagant reports of the havoc made were sent to France. It was pretended that three thousand cattle, three thousand sheep (Vaudreuil says four thousand), and from five hundred to fifteen hundred horses were destroyed, with other personal property to the amount of 1,500,000 livres. These official falsehoods are contradicted in a letter from Quebec,
Daine au Maréchal de Belleisle,
19
Mai,
1758. Lévis says that the whole population of the settlement, men, women, and children, was not above three hundred.

Notes - 5

1
Montcalm à Bourlamaque,
22
Mai,
1758.

2
Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine,
16
Sept
. 1757.
Ibid
.,
au Ministre de la Guerre, même date
.

3
Bougainville,
Journal
.
Montcalm à Mirepoix,
20
Avril,
1758. Lévis,
Journal de la Guerre du Canada
.

Notes - 6

1
Montcalm à Bourlamaque,
28
Mars,
1758.

2
Loudon to Pitt,
14
Feb
. 1758.

3
Journal de ce qui s’est passé en Canada,
1757, 1758. Compare Rogers,
Journals,
72-75.

Notes - 7

1
Rogers, two days after reaching Fort Edward, made a detailed report of the fight, which was printed in the
New Hampshire Gazette
and other provincial papers. It is substantially incorporated in his published
Journals,
which also contain a long letter from Pringle to Colonel Haviland, dated at Carillon (Ticonderoga), 28 March, and giving an excellent account of his and Roche’s adventures. It was sent by a flag of truce, which soon after arrived from Fort Edward with a letter for Vaudreuil. The French accounts of the fight are
Hebecourt à
[
Vaudreuil?
], 15
Mars,
1758.
Montcalm au Ministre de la Guerre,
10
Avril,
1758.
Doreil à Belleisle,
30
Avril,
1758. Bougainville,
Journal
.
Relation de l’Affaire de Rogers,
19
Mars,
1758.
Autre Relation, même date
. Lévis,
Journal
. According to Lévis, the French force consisted of 250 Indians and Canadians, and a number of officers, cadets, and soldiers. Rogers puts it at 700. Most of the French writers put the force of the rangers, correctly, at about 180. Rogers reports his loss at 125. None of the wounded seem to have escaped, being either murdered after the fight, or killed by exposure in the woods. The Indians brought in 144 scalps, having no doubt divided some of them, after their ingenious custom. Rogers threw off his overcoat during the fight, and it was found on the field, with his commission in the pocket; whence the report of his death. There is an unsupported tradition that he escaped by sliding on his snow-shoes down a precipice of Rogers Rock.

XVII

B
IGOT

His Life and Character · Canadian Society · Official Festivities · A Party of Pleasure · Hospitalities of Bigot · Desperate Gambling · Château Bigot · Canadian Ladies · Cadet · La Friponne · Official Rascality · Methods of Peculation · Cruel Frauds on the Acadians · Military Corruption · Péan · Love and Knavery · Varin and his Partners · Vaudreuil and the Peculators · He defends Bigot; praises Cadet and Péan · Canadian Finances · Peril of Bigot · Threats of the Minister · Evidence of Montcalm · Impending Ruin of the Confederates

At this stormy epoch of Canadian history the sinister figure of the Intendant Bigot moves conspicuous on the scene. Not that he was answerable for all the manifold corruption that infected the colony, for much of it was rife before his time, and had a vitality of its own; but his office and character made him the centre of it, and, more than any other man, he marshalled and organized the forces of knavery.

In the dual government of Canada the Governor represented the King and commanded the troops; while the Intendant was charged with trade, finance, justice, and all other departments of civil administration.
¹
In former times the two functionaries usually quarrelled; but between Vaudreuil and Bigot there was perfect harmony.

François Bigot, in the words of his biographer, was “born in the bosom of the magistracy,” both his father and his grandfather having held honorable positions in the parliament of Bordeaux.
²
In appearance he was not prepossessing, though his ugly, pimpled face was joined with easy and agreeable manners. In spite of indifferent health, he was untiring both in pleasure and in work, a skilful man of business, of great official experience, energetic, good-natured, free-handed, ready to oblige his friends and aid them in their needs at the expense of the King, his master; fond of social enjoyments, lavish in hospitality.

A year or two before the war began, the engineer Franquet was sent from France to strengthen Louisbourg and inspect the defences of Canada. He kept a copious journal, full of curious observation, and affording bright glimpses not only of the social life of the Intendant, but of Canadian society in the upper or official class. Thus, among various matters of the kind, he gives us the following. Bigot, who was in Quebec, had occasion to go to Montreal to meet the Governor; and this official journey was turned into a pleasure excursion, of which the King paid all the costs. Those favored with invitations, a privilege highly prized, were Franquet, with seven or eight military officers and a corresponding number of ladies, including the wife of Major Péan, of whom Bigot was enamoured. A chief steward, cooks, servants, and other attendants, followed the party. The guests had been requested to send their portmanteaus to the Intendant’s Palace six days before, that they might be sent forward on sledges along with bedding, table service, cooking utensils, and numberless articles of comfort and luxury. Orders were given to the inhabitants along the way, on pain of imprisonment, to level the snowdrifts and beat the road smooth with ox-teams, as also to provide relays of horses. It is true that they were well paid for this last service; so well that the hire of a horse to Montreal and back again would cost the King the entire value of the animal. On the eighth of February the party met at the palace; and after a grand dinner set out upon their journey in twenty or more sleighs, some with two guests and a driver, and the rest with servants and attendants. The procession passed at full trot along St. Vallier street amid the shouts of an admiring crowd, stopped towards night at Pointe-aux-Trembles, where each looked for lodging; and then they all met and supped with the Intendant. The militia captain of the place was ordered to have fresh horses ready at seven in the morning, when Bigot regaled his friends with tea, coffee, and chocolate, after which they set out again, drove to Cap-Santé, and stopped two hours at the house of the militia captain to breakfast and warm themselves. In the afternoon they reached
Ste.
Anne-de-la-Pérade, when Bigot gave them a supper at the house in which he lodged, and they spent the evening at cards.

The next morning brought them to Three Rivers, where Madame Marin, Franquet’s travelling companion, wanted to stop to see her sister, the wife of Rigaud, who was then governor of the place. Madame de Rigaud, being ill, received her visitors in bed, and ordered an ample dinner to be provided for them; after which they returned to her chamber for coffee and conversation. Then they all set out again, saluted by the cannon of the fort.

Their next stopping-place was Isle-au-Castor, where, being seated at cards before supper, they were agreeably surprised by the appearance of the Governor, who had come down from Montreal to meet them with four officers, Duchesnaye, Marin, Le Mercier, and Péan. Many were the embraces and compliments; and in the morning they all journeyed on together, stopping towards night at the largest house they could find, where their servants took away the partitions to make room, and they sat down to a supper, followed by the inevitable game of cards. On the next night they reached Montreal and were lodged at the intendency, the official residence of the hospitable Bigot. The succeeding day was spent in visiting persons of eminence and consideration, among whom are to be noted the names, soon to become notorious, of Varin, naval commissary, Martel, King’s storekeeper, Antoine Penisseault, and François Maurin. A succession of festivities followed, including the benediction of three flags for a band of militia on their way to the Ohio. All persons of quality in Montreal were invited on this occasion, and the Governor gave them a dinner and a supper. Bigot, however, outdid him in the plenitude of his hospitality, since, in the week before Lent, forty guests supped every evening at his table, and dances, masquerades, and cards consumed the night.
¹

His chief abode was at Quebec, in the capacious but somewhat ugly building known as the Intendant’s Palace. Here it was his custom during the war to entertain twenty persons at dinner every day; and there was also a hall for dancing, with a gallery to which the citizens were admitted as spectators.
²
The bounteous Intendant provided a separate dancing-hall for the populace; and, though at the same time he plundered and ruined them, his gracious demeanor long kept him a place in their hearts. Gambling was the chief feature of his entertainments, and the stakes grew deeper as the war went on. He played desperately himself, and early in 1758 lost two hundred and four thousand francs,—a loss which he well knew how to repair. Besides his official residence on the banks of the St. Charles, he had a country house about five miles distant, a massive old stone building in the woods at the foot of the mountain of Charlebourg; its ruins are now known as Château Bigot. In its day it was called the Hermitage; though the uses to which it was applied savored nothing of asceticism. Tradition connects it and its owner with a romantic, but more than doubtful, story of love, jealousy, and murder.

The chief Canadian families were so social in their habits and so connected by intermarriage that, along with the French civil and military officers of the colonial establishment, they formed a society whose members all knew each other, like the corresponding class in Virginia. There was among them a social facility and ease rare in democratic communities; and in the ladies of Quebec and Montreal were often seen graces which visitors from France were astonished to find at the edge of a wilderness. Yet this small though lively society had anomalies which grew more obtrusive towards the close of the war. Knavery makes strange companions; and at the tables of high civil officials and colony officers of rank sat guests as boorish in manners as they were worthless in character.

Foremost among these was Joseph Cadet, son of a butcher at Quebec, who at thirteen went to sea as a pilot’s boy, then kept the cows of an inhabitant of Charlebourg, and at last took up his father’s trade and prospered in it.
³
In 1756 Bigot got him appointed commissary-general, and made a contract with him which flung wide open the doors of peculation. In the next two years Cadet and his associates, Péan, Maurin, Corpron, and Penisseault, sold to the King, for about twenty-three million francs, provisions which cost them eleven millions, leaving a net profit of about twelve millions. It was not legally proved that the Intendant shared Cadet’s gains; but there is no reasonable doubt that he did so. Bigot’s chief profits rose, however, from other sources. It was his business to see that the King’s storehouses for the supply of troops, militia, and Indians were kept well stocked. To this end he and Bréard, naval comptroller at Quebec, made a partnership with the commercial house of Gradis and Son at Bordeaux. He next told the Colonial Minister that there were stores enough already in Canada to last three years, and that it would be more to the advantage of the King to buy them in the colony than to take the risk of sending them from France.
¹
Gradis and Son then shipped them to Canada in large quantities, while Bréard or his agent declared at the custom-house that they belonged to the King, and so escaped the payment of duties. They were then, as occasion rose, sold to the King at a huge profit, always under fictitious names. Often they were sold to some favored merchant or speculator, who sold them in turn to Bigot’s confederate, the King’s storekeeper; and sometimes they passed through several successive hands, till the price rose to double or triple the first cost, the Intendant and his partners sharing the gains with friends and allies. They would let nobody else sell to the King; and thus a grinding monopoly was established, to the great profit of those who held it.
²

Under the name of a trader named Claverie, Bigot, some time before the war, set up a warehouse on land belonging to the King and not far from his own palace. Here the goods shipped from Bordeaux were collected, to be sold in retail to the citizens, and in wholesale to favored merchants and the King. This establishment was popularly known as La Friponne, or The Cheat. There was another Friponne at Montreal, which was leagued with that of Quebec, and received goods from it.

Bigot and his accomplices invented many other profitable frauds. Thus he was charged with the disposal of the large quantity of furs belonging to his master, which it was his duty to sell at public auction, after due notice, to the highest bidder. Instead of this, he sold them privately at a low price to his own confederates. It was also his duty to provide transportation for troops, artillery, provisions, and stores, in which he made good profit by letting to the King, at high prices, boats or vessels which he had himself bought or hired for the purpose.
³

Yet these and other illicit gains still left him but the second place as public plunderer. Cadet, the commissary-general, reaped an ampler harvest, and became the richest man in the colony. One of the operations of this scoundrel, accomplished with the help of Bigot, consisted in buying for six hundred thousand francs a quantity of stores belonging to the King, and then selling them back to him for one million four hundred thousand.
¹
It was further shown on his trial that in 1759 he received 1,614,354 francs for stores furnished at the post of Miramichi, while the value of those actually furnished was but 889,544 francs; thus giving him a fraudulent profit of more than seven hundred and twenty-four thousand.
²
Cadet’s chief resource was the falsification of accounts. The service of the King in Canada was fenced about by rigid formalities. When supplies were wanted at any of the military posts, the commandant made a requisition specifying their nature and quantity, while, before pay could be drawn for them, the King’s storekeeper, the local commissary, and the inspector must set their names as vouchers to the list, and finally Bigot must sign it.
³
But precautions were useless where all were leagued to rob the King. It appeared on Cadet’s trial that by gifts of wine, brandy, or money he had bribed the officers, both civil and military, at all the principal forts to attest the truth of accounts in which the supplies furnished by him were set at more than twice their true amount. Of the many frauds charged against him there was one peculiarly odious. Large numbers of refugee Acadians were to be supplied with rations to keep them alive. Instead of wholesome food, mouldered and unsalable salt cod was sent them, and paid for by the King at inordinate prices.
⁴
It was but one of many heartless outrages practised by Canadian officials on this unhappy people.

Cadet told the Intendant that the inhabitants were hoarding their grain, and got an order from him requiring them to sell it at a low fixed price, on pain of having it seized. Thus nearly the whole fell into his hands. Famine ensued; and he then sold it at a great profit, partly to the King, and partly to its first owners. Another of his devices was to sell provisions to the King which, being sent to the outlying forts, were falsely reported as consumed; on which he sold them to the King a second time. Not without reason does a writer of the time exclaim: “This is the land of abuses, ignorance, prejudice, and all that is monstrous in government. Peculation, monopoly, and plunder have become a bottomless abyss.”
⁵

The command of a fort brought such opportunities of making money that, according to Bougainville, the mere prospect of appointment to it for the usual term of three years was thought enough for a young man to marry upon. It was a favor in the gift of the Governor, who was accused of sharing the profits. These came partly from the fur-trade, and still more from frauds of various kinds. For example, a requisition was made for supplies as gifts to the Indians in order to keep them friendly or send them on the war-path; and their number was put many times above the truth in order to get more goods, which the commandant and his confederates then bartered for furs on their own account, instead of giving them as presents. “And,” says a contemporary, addressing the Colonial Minister, “those who treat the savages so basely are officers of the King, depositaries of his authority, ministers of that Great Onontio whom they call their father.”
¹
At the post of Green Bay, the partisan officer Marin, and Rigaud, the Governor’s brother, made in a short time a profit of three hundred and twelve thousand francs.
²
“Why is it,” asks Bougainville, “that of all which the King sends to the Indians two thirds are stolen, and the rest sold to them instead of being given?”
³