by Oliver North
For the three Rifle Companies, it’s not just a matter of carrying our batteaux and much diminished provisions twelve miles west and uphill to the Dead River. From here on, we are to widen this narrow path so 220 twenty-six-foot-long, three-foot-wide batteaux, weighing 400 pounds each can be transported over terrain heretofore used by small parties of Indians carrying lightly loaded, slender canoes.
This morning, Saturday, October 7th, it is alternately snowing and raining so Captain Morgan told Captains Smith and Hendricks to rest their men while our Virginia Rifle Company pressed forward carrying our batteaux and using our hatchets and some limited pioneer equipment—axes, saws, spades, pick-axes, and a few adzes—to broaden the two-foot-wide footpath to ten feet in width. We managed to progress little more than a mile by nightfall.
Sunday, October 8th the weather was equally bad. Despite the continuing rain and snow, our company managed to cut and clear another two miles. Near dusk the two Pennsylvania Rifle Companies moved up to our position to encamp for the night. When they arrived, Captain Smith reported an ice-coated falling tree killed one of his Riflemen early this morning. It was our first casualty since leaving Cambridge on the 11th of September.
Monday, the 9th of October the air is cold, the sky is clear, the moon is full, and Captain Morgan has us up and cutting brush before the sun tinted the eastern horizon. Despite the early start and improved weather, we only manage to advance three miles. We do little better on October 10th.
On Wednesday, October 11th, shortly after we were underway, Lieutenant Colonel Greene’s 2nd Division overtook us from behind. He had with him Colonel Arnold’s order relieving the Rifle Companies of our “road building” duties and directing us to proceed “by the most expeditious means possible to secure a rendezvous site for the entire force at Lake Mégantic.”
By noon on Thursday the 12th, all three Rifle Companies have gladly surrendered most of our “road-building” tools to Lieutenant Colonel Greene’s Massachusetts “Musket-men” and the pioneers3 sent forward from Col. Enos’s Fourth Division.
In order to help mark the way forward and provide security for Lieutenant Colonel Greene’s “road builders,” Captain Morgan ordered our Virginia Rifle Company forward of them—dragging our batteaux with us up the narrow Indian trail.
We started out early Friday, October 13th, about a mile ahead of the pioneers and nearly to the second of the three “ponds” on the route. As we trudged uphill in heavy rain, a messenger from our lead security element was sighted running toward us. He breathlessly reported, “possible enemy movement ahead.”
Captain Morgan quickly ordered 1st Lt. Humphrey to alert the rest of our Rifle Company and told our little Headquarters team, “Grab your rifles, fighting gear, and follow me.”
We ran up the path for about a quarter mile where we discovered the “possible enemy” is actually Lieutenant Steele’s twelve-man scouting party. They are a pitiful sight; ragged, filthy dirty, and exhausted. Four of them carried no packs or equipment, and only six were carrying rifles.
Lieutenant Steele, clearly overjoyed, told Captain Morgan they were heading south to report to Colonel Arnold they had made their way to the Height of Land above the Dead River but all are now near starvation. Hearing this, Captain Morgan ordered Corporal Sullivan, “break out some of our good rations and feed these men.”
As his men ate their first real meal in nearly a week, Lt. Steele briefed us on our path ahead. Some excerpts from my journal entries:
“We made it all the way to the Height of Land and found no evidence of British patrols or hostile Indians.”
“The ‘ponds’ between here and the Dead River are navigable lakes for canoes and given the recent snow and rain, likely for batteaux.”
“However, the deceptive terrain connecting the remaining two ‘ponds’ between here and the Dead River is really a series of bogs and knee-deep swampland. It sucked shoes, boots, or moccasins off our feet when we were carrying little more than two lightweight canoes, rifles, and haversacks. God only knows what it will do to six men carrying a 400-pound batteau.”
“The Dead River only appears to be dead. There are parts of it where it is broad and gentle. Other sections are a swift-moving, very narrow stream in deep ravines during dry weather. But after heavy rains like we have been having, it quickly becomes a raging torrent. It rose so quickly in last week’s rain and snow as to destroy both our canoes. Nearly all of our provisions and equipment were swept away.”
“Since running out of food five days ago we have subsisted on wild game and fish, but too little of either.”
“The route between here and the Height of Land increases in elevation by at least one thousand feet. Every inch is brutal—and we weren’t carrying batteaux.”
In early afternoon we sent them on their way south with two days’ worth of our scant rations, instructions to follow all the blazed trees we left behind and advice that Lieutenant Colonel Greene’s Second Division is closing on our heels.
For the remainder of the 13th through most of the 16th we moved forward with most of the Pennsylvania Riflemen trailing Lieutenant Greene’s reinforced Second Division and Virginia Rifle Company providing advance security.
Late in the day on Monday, October 16th, a messenger came forward to advise us Lieutenant Colonel Greene is in desperate need of food and intends to hold up awaiting Lieutenant Colonel Enos and Fourth Division to arrive with more provisions.
Early on Tuesday, October 17th we learned it would be several more days before the “Reserve Supplies will catch up,” so Captain Morgan ordered Captains Smith and Hendricks to bring their Pennsylvania Rifle Companies forward.
By dark on Wednesday, October 18th all three of our Rifle Companies are again in the lead of the expedition and encamped on the banks of the Dead River.
Ascending the Dead River, Maine
Thursday, October 19th, 1775
Despite non-stop wind, bone-chilling cold, and scant food, our entire First Division began to advance up the Dead River shortly after dawn on Thursday, October 19th.
That night the low-hanging clouds opened on us and, thankfully, Colonel Morgan held us in place waiting to see what the Dead River would do with all the “new water.”
Shortly after noon on Friday, October 20th, a messenger from Lt. Col. Greene’s Second Division caught up with our slow-moving column inquiring if we had any food to spare. We don’t.
All the edible food we have left are nine barrels of properly prepared, packed, and sealed flour, salted beef and pork we brought with us from Virginia. At half-rations, this was deemed to be enough to feed our one hundred Virginia Riflemen and the two Pennsylvania Rifle Companies for just five days.
Unfortunately, there is no longer any wild game to be seen around us and it appears the recent floods have flushed all the fish downstream. Though Greene’s messenger tells us they have been reduced to boiling the leather tongues of their shoes in order to subsist, Captain Morgan tells the messenger, “Please inform Lieutenant Colonel Greene, I regret we have no food to spare.”
At dawn, Sunday, October 22nd, we awakened to find the supposedly placid Dead River rising so fast we have to scramble to higher ground for safety.
On Monday, October 23rd, as we were getting underway, we discovered water rushing down the Dead River has already inundated the land on both sides of the river and the surrounding countryside. A half dozen of our First Division batteaux were lost in the maelstrom this morning, including the boat being poled and rowed by 1st Lieutenant William Humphrey. He nearly drowned when his vessel capsized and all their gear was lost.
The near tragedies prompted Colonel Arnold to summon his nearest officers for a “Council of War” at noon the same day. Captain Morgan, 1st Lt. Humphrey, Corporal Sullivan, and I paddled our canoe less than four miles downstream on the Dead River where Colonel Arnold has co-located his headquarters with Lieutenant Colonel Greene�
�s Second Division.
There, we were joined by Major Return Meigs, commanding officer of the Third Division, Captain Reuben Colburn heading the “Batteaux Repair Unit,” Doctor Isaac Senter, our Expedition Medical Officer, our chaplain, Rev. Samuel Spring, and Lieutenants Steele and Church, leaders of our Scouting Parties.
Colonel Arnold began by asking, “Who here believes we should abandon all hope of liberating Quebec?”
No one did.
By the end of the meeting it was decided:
1. A small scouting party led by Lieutenants Steele and Church will proceed immediately to reconnoiter the fastest route to Lake Mégantic which the three Rifle Companies will follow to secure a rendezvous site for the Expedition on the shores of Lake Mégantic.
2. The scouting party will then proceed across the Height of Land and down the Chaudière River valley to the French settlement, Sartigan, to buy any cattle, hogs, chickens, sheep, fish, and all available corn or flour the French inhabitants are willing to sell and return with the food supplies to the secure rendezvous site.
3. Those who are too weak or sick to press on to Quebec will be assisted in returning to Fort Western by fifty men of Lieutenant Colonel Enos’s Fourth Division.
4. The rest of the Expedition Force will proceed as fast as possible to the selected rendezvous site at Lake Mégantic.
We set out thereafter with Major Meigs and his Third Division close behind us.
On Wednesday, October 25th Lieutenant Colonel Greene sent a messenger forward to inform us Lieutenant Colonel Enos and the entire Fourth Division voted to quit and return to Fort Western with the Expedition’s sick and injured.
Captain Morgan, Lieutenant Colonel Greene, Major Meigs, and Colonel Arnold are outraged. Worse still, Enos claimed to have only one barrel of flour to give to those of us remaining on the mission. No wonder some of our Riflemen began referring to him as “Colon Anus.”
As we struggled through the muck below the Height of Land and the Canadian border late on Thursday, the 26th of October, I noticed our Virginia Rifle Company is the only unit in the Expedition still carrying seven batteaux. Some of the ones we lost on the 23rd have been replaced with those the “Enos Cowards” left behind.
Each of the two Pennsylvania Companies brought one batteau apiece, but none of the New England Musket Companies took any. It was during the exhausting struggle through the swamp below the Height of Land that Pennsylvania Rifleman Private James Warner succumbed to fatigue, the cold, and hunger.
His wife, Jemima, nursed him for nearly a week before he expired. After enlisting some of his friends to help her bury her young husband in a shallow grave, she picked up his rifle, hatchet, scalping knife, powder horn, and shot pouch and rejoined his comrades in arms as they labored uphill toward the Canadian border.
Our exhausted Virginia Rifle Company arrived at the Height of Land late on Thursday, October 26th. By late Saturday the 28th we were encamped less than a mile from the southern shore of Lake Mégantic. The challenges our starving force endured in hauling our nearly empty batteaux this far made all the previous hardships we endured seem pale by comparison.
The following day, Sunday, October 29th, our excitement at reaching the Height of Land and the Canadian border was tempered when six of our seven batteaux crashed into the rocks of the Chaudière River rapids, throwing Captain Morgan and me into the cascade.
We lost nearly all our remaining provisions, equipment, our doctor’s medical kit, and my field desk. Thankfully, all but one of the rifles was saved as were four well-sealed French powder kegs and the last half-barrel of rum.
Cold, starving, and demoralized, our Expedition now totals fewer than 650 men of the original 1,100. Only Captain Morgan’s resilience and belief in God’s providence keeps us moving. Though suffering as much as any man in our company, Captain Morgan constantly moves up and down our ranks, helping, encouraging, and assuring us Col. Arnold will have provisions awaiting our arrival.
By the first days of November, our starving men are eating soap, beeswax candles, hair grease, oiled moccasins, shot pouches, and even a company commander’s dog. Yet, our Riflemen stagger on, many supported by their rifles.
Thanks be to God, on Friday morning November 2nd, the Steele-Church scouting party dispatched by Colonel Arnold to buy provisions from French settlers in Sartigan at the bottom of the Chaudière River valley returned, driving before them a herd of cattle and aided by an Indian named Natanis.
Our officers had to force their starving men to start fires and cook the beef so they would not eat it raw as the animals were being butchered.
Revived by the food we so desperately needed, on Sunday, November 5th, Colonel Arnold had our Virginia Rifle Company resume our Advance Security mission and lead our much depleted expedition out of the Chaudière valley and head for Pointe Lévis on the south side of the Saint Lawrence River, directly across from Quebec City.
We moved at night, attempting to avoid detection from lookouts on the walls of the city and aboard two recently arrived Royal Navy combatants, the frigate HMS Lizard and the sloop Hunter and four other armed British vessels anchored in the St. Lawrence.
On Thursday, November 9th we arrived at Pointe Lévis where we were joined by a band of thirty-seven Indians and twenty-three French Canadians who professed their desire to join our fight against the British.
By the time we ended our eight-week, 380-mile march and set up camp at Pointe Lévis, across the St. Lawrence River from Quebec, the Expeditionary Force numbered just 597. We lost sixty-three men from privation, drowning, injury, and freezing. Seventy-six turned back because of illness or injury. Eleven were charged with desertion, and the treachery and cowardice of Lieutenant Colonel Enos cost us another 353. But our Virginia Rifle Company has lost only one man drowned and suffered no deserters, unique among all the units which set out from Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 11th.
With no accurate information on the whereabouts of General Montgomery’s Northern Army, Colonel Arnold dispatched Lieutenant Aaron Burr and five of Lieutenant Steele’s scouts up the St. Lawrence toward Montreal to guide General Montgomery to where we are preparing to assault Quebec City. While we await their return, Colonel Arnold and Captain Morgan have us busy collecting birch-bark and dugout canoes to replace the batteaux lost on the long journey.
Of equal importance we are slowly buying replacement muskets, powder, and shot for weapons lost aboard crashed batteaux and manufacturing scaling ladders and iron-tipped pikes for when we strike.
Endnotes
1.During the late eighteenth century, the most widely accepted coin circulating in the American Colonies was the Spanish silver dollar consisting of 387 grains of pure silver. The dollar was divided into “pieces of eight,” each consisting of one-eighth of a dollar. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the Spanish dollar was the most stable and least debased coin in the Western world.
2.Uses promptos facit; Latin for “Use makes perfect.” The modern idiom, “Practice makes perfect.”
3.“Pioneers” in eighteenth-century armies were soldiers equipped for specialized engineering and construction tasks such as field fortifications, military camps, roads, and bridges.
At Fort Halifax, Colonel Arnold directed Lieutenant Colonel Enos to designate fifty members of the Fourth Division to serve as pioneers for the Expedition and acquire appropriate equipment—a significant challenge in the remote Maine wilderness.
Chapter Thirteen
1775: QUEBEC—SETTING THE STAGE FOR BATTLE
Thus far in this chronological record, I have relied only on my own contemporaneous notes. In short, it reflects what I knew at the time I wrote it down. Activities and events prior to my appointment as Captain Morgan’s Adjutant are from entries in my personal diaries. All subsequent information—from Monday, April 24th, 1775, the day I became Rifle Company Adjutant—through Thursday, November 9th, 177
5 are from Official Rifle Company Journals and Logs (numbered 1–15). These official records were preserved by passing them initially to Charles Mynn Thruston and later to Captain (and subsequently, Major) Hans Christian Febiger, the Arnold Expedition’s Adjutant. He, in turn, relayed my journals and logbooks numbered 1–15 (along with official documents from the Adjutants of other expedition units) back to Fort Western and thence to Continental Army Headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
On Friday, November 10th, 1775, I began making entries in Journal #16. Due to the terrible tragedy on the night of December 31st, 1775 volume #16 of our Official Rifle Company Journal has never been recovered. Therefore, the chronological record of events below is derived from my recollections and the testimony of other eye-witness participants, compiled, in some cases, months or even years after the activity being chronicled.
Whether this makes the record below more or less accurate than my sole contemporaneous note-taking, I leave for others to decide. What’s certain is the record from Friday, November 10th, 1775 forward, has been shaped by others’ memories and supplemented with ex post facto knowledge.1
Pointe Lévis, Canada
Friday, November 10th, 1775
By dawn on Friday, November 10th, 1775, Colonel Arnold has assembled all our ragged, weary, and formerly famished survivors of the expedition in and around Pointe Lévis. The local population consists of about 150 French settlers, farmers, and now out-of-work ferryboat and gristmill workers. Nearly 100 Indian families are in the neighborhood.
Some of our New England officers have expressed concerns about having lost the element of surprise and being bivouacked in full view, within cannon range of the enemy looking down on us from the formidable walls of Quebec City. Captain Morgan isn’t one of the critics.
He, Col. Arnold, Major Febiger, and Natanis, the English-speaking Abenaki Indian sub-chieftain who befriended the American cause, chose this riverside settlement on the south bank of the St. Lawrence as our encampment for five very good reasons.