Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

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  Until the war came. In the spring of 1775, soon after the Mackenzies arrived, letters began to trickle in from abroad. The British army was on its way, by sea, eleven regiments of foot and a seventy-four-gun man-of-war with them.

  New York was too polyglot and multifarious to fit neatly into either side’s camp. It was too full of immigrants to be trusted, too full of Loyalists for full-throated support of liberty and insurrection, too full of patriots for the British leadership to rest at ease. John Adams complained that New York was one-third loyal to the king, one-third revolutionary, and one-third undecided; George Washington was convinced the city was full of British spies. After the state legislators voted to refuse to send delegates to the Continental Congress, they sang a chorus of “God Save the King.” When Washington and the British royal governor William Tryon rode through the city during separate parades, equal crowds lined the streets to cheer them, many of the same people attending both events.

  It took four days for the news of the April skirmishes at Lexington and Concord to arrive in the city, but when it did, all patriots were summoned to an emergency meeting at the Liberty Pole on the Common. The crowd whipped itself into a frenzy, and a general insurrection broke out, men storming the arsenal at city hall and stealing six hundred muskets, bayonets, and cartridge boxes. The Continental Association deputized local committees to root out conspiracies and extract patriotic loyalty oaths from their fellow citizens, and British ships were turned away from port before they could unload cargo. A crowd attacked the home of the president of King’s College; based on a tip from Alexander Hamilton, who hated rule by mob and Crown equally, the chancellor escaped in the middle of the night, half-dressed, over a fence. Later, the offices of the Loyalist Gazetteer, the leading newspaper of the time with a circulation of over thirty-five hundred, was sacked by patriots, who smashed the presses and stole all of the movable type.

  By May 1775, the Crown representatives in New York were complaining of near anarchy, and anyone with the means was fleeing the city. But then the HMS Asia arrived and anchored in the harbor, defiantly flaunting the flimsy armaments that guarded the approaches. That August, when patriots snuck into the Battery to steal the British cannon, the Asia retaliated by firing into the city, first grapeshot, and then a full thirty-two-gun broadside. It was the first British shelling of New York, and all remaining citizens either turned against their king or fled. Lower Manhattan became a fortress, breastworks across every path leading down to the water, cobblestoned streets torn up to build walls. Average citizens, all males of a certain age, were put to work. “The city looks in some streets as if the plague had been in it, so many houses being shut up,” wrote one resident.

  Corc Mackenzie had just arrived, and decades of loyal service to his king outweighed months of kinship to his new home. This made him a Tory. “Pray, what is a Tory?” went the joke. “A Tory is a thing whose head is in England and its body in America and its neck ought to be stretched.” The New York Provincial Congress ordered the death penalty for anyone providing aid or comfort to the British. Loyalists were pulled from their homes, stripped, covered in hot tar and then doused in feathers, tossed on a rail to be driven about town, where they could be pelted with sticks and stones by the mob. The American Revolution was a civil war as well.

  The city was no place to raise a child; press gangs, on both sides, were nabbing boys as young as fifteen. When the Mackenzies had debarked the Peace & Plenty months before, all of the talk among new immigrants on the eastern wharf was the land available near Albany. Swindlers and speculators accosted every family with any visible sign of means, pitching them a sliver of farm up north for their very own. The Mackenzies had a little money and could land on their feet.

  Every civilian with a dollar to his name was fleeing New York. Alexander and his family went north, up the Hudson to join his uncle, his mother’s brother, John Maciver, called “Ready Money John” because of his access to cash. Alexander Mackenzie crossed the Endless Mountains of the Appalachians, his first step into the vast interior of the continent, to make a new home among the Mohawk and Mohican.

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  Sir William Johnson was the lord of the winding valley of the Mohawk and presided over all of the commerce and conflict that passed through it. Johnson was a Scots-Irish immigrant, arriving in North America in 1738, and became a trusted agent of King George, pushing out the few German and Dutch settlers from his valley and replacing them with kin. In this way, he created a fur-trading enterprise unlike any other in the New World, a fiefdom ruled by him in partnership with the Six Nations of the Iroquois.

  The Iroquois were also known as the Haudenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse. In their original compact, predating European settlement of North America, the nations organized themselves using the idea of the longhouse as a unifying symbol. The Mohawk, near the Hudson River valley, were the Keepers of the Eastern Door. The Seneca, hard against the Niagara Frontier, the Keepers of the Western Door. The Onondaga, as the central nation, the Keepers of the Flame. The fur-trading post of Albany sat at the Eastern Door, and with the Mohawk, Sir William Johnson found his fortune.

  Johnson settled on the north bank of the river, used his modest familial wealth to buy a farm and build a store and sawmill, and then, year by year, sought to monopolize the trading of all furs bound for New York City. To do this, he made peace with the Mohawk, forged an alliance, and was named a sachem of the tribe. In 1739, he married a young German indentured servant, and produced a white family, and at the same time wedded a Mohawk woman, and made a family they called mixed bloods. And his partner in all things was Hendrick, the Mohawk chief. Together they grew rich trading beaver fur, and Johnson clothed Hendrick in a great red cloak and had his portrait painted, bearing both hatchet and tricorn hat, as an Indian and a gentleman and a wealthy and powerful man.

  With the consent of the Crown and the confederacy, Johnson and Hendrick raised an army to punish their enemies, the French and the Huron and the Mohican. Hendrick recruited hundreds of warriors to raid border settlements, and Johnson paid for each scalp the men returned. But these were mere skirmishes compared with the war that was to come in 1754.

  In Great Britain and France, it came to be known as the Seven Years’ War. On the Indian subcontinent, it was the Third Carnatic War. In Prussia, the Third Silesian War. In South America, the Fantastic War. In North America, in the colonies where Johnson fought, it was called the French and Indian War. The whole world was at war, it seemed, all of Western Christendom, wherever Protestants and Catholics ground against one another. On the New England frontier, this meant the British and Iroquois fighting the French, Huron, Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Algonquin.

  In 1755, Johnson was formally appointed a major general, and he and Hendrick went to battle together, meeting their enemies near Crown Point, at the northern tip of Lake George. It was a costly victory; Hendrick was mortally wounded, and Johnson took a ball in the hip that gave him a permanent limp. He returned home with a remnant of his army and, with Hendrick gone, resigned his commission.

  But four years later, after a sequence of failed raids and false starts, Britain found itself on the verge of victory. Johnson took command once more and fielded an army of colonial militia, British regulars, and one thousand Iroquois warriors, the entire military strength of the Six Nations. Johnson painted his face as an Iroquois war chief and led the combined force west to lay siege to the French castle at Fort Niagara. Johnson assaulted the keep and blocked the French relief column, and, in the aftermath, the French forts and trading posts were burned, and the British would occupy the garrisons along the Niagara River and Great Lakes for two generations. The next year, 1760, Johnson rode north to Montreal and, with Lord Amherst, accepted the final surrender of New France.

  Thick with victory, Johnson returned to his river valley and multiplied his kingdom several times over in the midst of the Mohawk people. He cleared a sec
tion of forest and constructed a new compound, Johnson Hall, and filled it with family and Mohawk allies, who bequeathed him vast tracts of land throughout northern New York. In the name of the Crown, Johnson made peace and traded furs with twenty-four Indian nations, the remaining Iroquois and Huron and Algonquin out to Lake Superior, and their good faith was enshrined in belts of beads. Johnson was already known as Warraghiyagey, One Who Does Much, and the assembled sachem presented him, and him alone, with the sacred Two Row Wampum Belt, a 160-year-old physical embodiment of peace and friendship. When Johnson died in 1774, the six chiefs of the Six Nations buried him as an Iroquois.

  Johnstown was still in mourning when Alexander Mackenzie and his family arrived in 1775. By then the village was also known as Scotch Bush, a sign of the number of their fellow immigrants. The oldest son of Johnson’s white union, John, inherited his father’s estates and titles. He was known as a land dealer who could set up a family like the Mackenzies with a small farm. John Johnson continued the partnership with the Mohawk and carried on with the lucrative fur trade, and Alexander Mackenzie saw the generational wealth and power possible when white man and Indian aligned.

  But Johnson also made close ties with the new center of British power, the governor-general in Montreal. When the American Revolution broke out in the colonies, there was no question that Baronet John Johnson and his pledged landowners would remain loyal to the Crown. In January 1776, the younger Johnson vowed to raise an army like his father and promised the king a battalion of loyal Scots and five hundred Iroquois warriors.

  When the patriot army came for Johnson’s guns, he led his retainers and Iroquois allies to Montreal. It was the last march of the united Iroquois people. By the end of the revolution, some nations would choose the side of the colonists, and some, like the Mohawk, would stay loyal to their British allies, and the house so divided against itself crumbled, the six-hundred-year confederacy of the Iroquois in crisis.

  In Montreal, Johnson sought provisioning and counsel with the British military command. Corc Mackenzie accompanied him. As a new landowner, he served as one of Johnson’s retainers and was named a lieutenant. Young Alexander stayed behind with his aunts. The old man had finally found his war. Alexander never saw his father again.

  The British strategy in northern New York was two-pronged. The main force pushed south from Montreal, through the traditional invasion route used by European armies for two hundred years: Lake Champlain to Fort Ticonderoga on Lake George, down the Hudson to New York City. Johnson, on the other hand, as part of a second, smaller force, would sail up the St. Lawrence River to Lake Ontario, turn south, and then attack from the west along the Mohawk River, through his own lands at Johnson Hall. Resistance was expected to be light; Benedict Arnold and the American colonial army had already been turned aside at Quebec City in the winter of 1775, and thus the British still nominally controlled all of New York outside Manhattan. The two armies expected to face no more than ragged militia.

  The war did not proceed as planned. John Johnson led Corc and the rest of the King’s Royal Regiment of New York—also known as the Royal Yorkers, also known as the Royal Greens—on the large left hook as planned. But Johnson was stopped short by the colonial garrison at Fort Stanwix, upriver of his holdings. The Mohawk valley proved itself as politically divided as New York City. Most newly immigrated Scots, like the Mackenzies, stayed loyal to the Crown, but their long-settled German, Dutch, and English neighbors became patriots. With Johnson and his army delayed, there was no one to stop patriots from holding demonstrations and reprisals in the streets. The rebel colonists fell on Johnson Hall, burned nearby farms, and held Lady Johnson hostage.

  The main force, moving directly south from Montreal, encountered even greater trouble. Defeated at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, the British surrendered over sixty-five hundred prisoners. It was the decisive loss of the revolution. France would enter the war. The British would lose. America would be free, and the Loyalists would pay.

  With Corc gone to war and unable to protect his family, Alexander Mackenzie and his aunts were forced to flee again, joining tens of thousands of refugees. Some Scots made for the Niagara Peninsula, for a hard farm life in places like Hamilton and St. Catharines. But thousands more went north, to Montreal and Quebec, the last remaining holdouts of urban British power on the continent. Sir John Johnson had many connections with the gentry in Montreal, and the sons of his retainers were the beneficiaries. In 1778, Alexander, aged sixteen, moved again, to take up a position afforded to privileged boys. He soon became a clerk in a countinghouse, apprenticed to the firm of Finlay & Gregory. His job was to tally beaver furs, and he could not know at the time that the direction of his life was set.

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  MONTREAL, 1778

  Montreal was an old French city with new British rulers and flooded with so many refugees that in only a decade it had doubled in size, to become nearly as large as New York City. Montreal attracted Loyalists on the losing end of the American Revolution, merchants who preferred profits to politics, poor Scots and former redcoat soldiers, failed English businessmen fleeing their debts.

  The city was a place of stone and mud and cold. Montreal was surrounded by fresh new walls—twenty feet high and almost as thick—built by the French to keep out the English and Americans. Inside, the town hosted uniform row houses with high pitched roofs, the better to shed snow, and a skyline of smoking chimneys. Few of the streets were cobblestoned, leaving the majority an open sewer of slush or muck, depending on the season.

  Along rue St.-François-Xavier, near the corner of rue St.-Paul and the old Market Gate, Alexander Mackenzie found work and lodging in a countinghouse, as a clerk for Mr. John Gregory, an up-and-coming English gentleman of twenty-eight years. Gregory was new to North America, but he had forged a partnership with a well-established trader, a Scot named Mr. James Finlay, who had first worked far to the west, in Detroit and Fort Michilimackinac, under the auspices of Sir William Johnson. Mackenzie heard that in 1768 Mr. Finlay had even traveled to a distant northern place called the Saskatchwine and survived the winter there, along a frozen river.

  The two men used Finlay’s experience, Gregory’s energy, and their combined capital to grow the risky new business. They required educated boys who could write, to keep the ledgers of goods coming in and furs going out. “Most of the clerks were young men of good families, from the Highlands of Scotland,” wrote the American chronicler Washington Irving. “A candidate had to enter, as it were, ‘before the mast,’ to undergo a long probation, and to rise slowly by the merits of his services. He began, at an early age, as a clerk, and served an apprenticeship of seven years.”

  Alexander was only sixteen, but many of his fellow clerks were years younger. Unmoored though he was, Alexander felt at home in the trade, with so many clannish Scots around, accepting the hardscrabble opportunities overlooked by most of their English wig-wearing cousins. Everyone knew, as Washington Irving wrote, that Scots were “characterized by the perseverance, thrift, and fidelity of their country, and fitted by their native hardihood to encounter the rigorous climate of the north.” The standard joke held that Scots went to Canada to get warm.

  But in Montreal, Alexander saw that despite those hardships, if he worked hard and made it, he could be a gentleman like Mr. Finlay, a bourgeois, the rich fur traders of the interior.

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  Montreal was in the heart of New France, a colony that often seemed to bore its host country and attracted only occasional Parisian interest. Each European power sought something different from its American holdings. The Spanish were hungry for plunder. The English grew prosperous with their farms and plantations. But the French never invested in New France and accidentally followed a policy of benign neglect.

  First to colonize the New World was Spain, a country still very much in the grip of the Inquisition. In the Caribbean, Mexico, and South America, Spain found a rich bounty: Indian souls to speed a
long to a Catholic Christ, and gold to pay for wars at home. The armada ruled the seas, the conquistadors bled the land from Peru to Florida, and for the Spanish might and right were inseparable.

  The English were delayed in their settlement of North America, but once they founded Jamestown in the early seventeenth century, a far different attitude prevailed. The first colonists of Massachusetts and Virginia were Calvinists, fleeing a state religion rather than spreading one. And in their portion of the continent, the riches lay in arable land, not gold. Stories of Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving notwithstanding, the English colonists mostly ignored the local Indian tribes. Calvinism preaches predestination. Cotton Mather and the other Massachusetts Bay Colony immigrants were fated for heaven, the Indians for hell. What was there to talk about? Each tribe was forced off its land to secure plantations where the English then wished nothing more but to be left alone. Acre by acre, they migrated, inward from the coast, tilling as they went.

  The French took a third tack. After crossing the upper Atlantic, they found forests and rivers and snow of seemingly endless depth. Few French settlers were enticed by the rocky farms. No more than a couple hundred Troupes de la Marine were regularly garrisoned in New France at any one time. The handful of missionaries preferred cohabitation to war with the Indians. “We rove about with them and hunt with them and live among them without arms and without fear,” wrote one Jesuit in 1611. The French did not wish to conquer or displace these tribes; they wanted partners. The native Huron and Algonquin possessed vastly superior technology—canoes instead of rowboats, snowshoes and toboggans instead of boots and wagons—to gain access to the north.

  Jacques Cartier explored the mouth of the St. Lawrence in the early 1530s as the Spanish conquered empires much farther south. But after mapping the river—sailing as far inland as the rapids at Hochelaga, a fortified village of several thousand Iroquois—Cartier returned home. The country was too hard, too cold, too grim; Cartier called it “frightful and ill-shaped…the land God gave to Cain.” His colony failed, the French were distracted, and they ignored the land for the rest of the century.