How stand both sides at the opening of the year 1756, on the verge of the Seven Years' War,—the struggle for a continent?
There has been open war for more than a year, but war is not formally declared till May 18, 1756.
Take Acadia first.
The French have been expelled. The infamous Le Loutre is still in prison in England, and when he is released, in 1763, he toils till his death, in 1773, trying to settle the Acadian refugees on some of the French islands of the English Channel. The smiling farms of Grand Pré and Port Royal lie a howling waste. Only a small English garrison holds Annapolis, where long ago Marc L'Escarbot and Champlain held happy revel; and the seat of government has been transferred to Halifax, now a settlement and fort of some five thousand people. So much for the English. Across a narrow arm of the sea is Isle Royal or Cape Breton, where the French are intrenched as at a second Gibraltar in the fortress of Louisburg. Since the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle restored the fort to the French, millions have been spent strengthening its walls, adding to the armaments; but Intendant Bigot has had charge of the funds, and Intendant Bigot has a sponge-like quality of absorbing all funds that flow through his hands. Cannon have been added, but there are not enough balls to go round. The walls have been repaired, but with false filling (sand in place of mortar), so that the first shatter of artillery will send them clattering down in wet plaster.
Take the Ohio next.
"Beautiful River" is the highway between New France and Louisiana. By Braddock's defeat the English have been driven out to a man. Matters are a thousandfold worse than before, for the savage allies of the French now swarm down the bush road cut by Braddock's army and carry bloody havoc to all the frontier settlements of Pennsylvania and Virginia. How many pioneers perished in this border war will never be known. It is a tale by itself, and its story is not part of Canada's history. George Washington was the officer in charge of a thousand bushfighters to guard this frontier.
Take the valley of Lake Champlain.
This is the highway of approach to Montreal north, to Albany south. Johnson had defeated Dieskau here, but neither side was strong enough to advance from the scene of battle into the territory of the enemy. The English take possession of Lake George and intrench themselves at the south end in Fort William Henry. Sir William Johnson strings a line of forts up the Mohawk River towards Oswego on Lake Ontario, and he keeps his forest rangers, under the famous scout Major Robert Rogers, scouring the forest and mountain trails of Lake Champlain for French marauder and news of what the French are doing. Rogers' Rangers, too, are a story by themselves, but a story which does not concern Canada. Skating and snowshoeing by winter, canoeing by night in summer, Rogers passed and repassed the enemy's lines times without number, as if his life were charmed, though once his wrist was shot when he had nothing to stanch the blood but the ribbon tying his wig, and once he stumbled back exhausted to Fort William Henry, to lie raging with smallpox for the winter. Among the forest rangers of New Hampshire and New York, Major Robert Rogers was without a peer. No danger was too great, no feat too daring, for his band of scouts. The English have established Fort William Henry at the south end of Lake George. The French checkmate the move by strengthening Crown Point on Lake Champlain and moving a pace farther south into English territory,—to Carillon, where the waters of Lake George pour into Champlain. Here on a high angle between the river and the lake, commanding all travel north and south, the French build Carillon or Fort Ticonderoga.
As for the Great Northwest, New France with her string of posts—Frontenac, Niagara, Detroit, Michilimackinac, Kaministiquia (Fort William), Fort Rogue (Winnipeg), Portage la Prairie—stretches clear across to the foothills of the Rockies. The English fur traders of Hudson Bay have, in 1754, sent Anthony Hendry up the Saskatchewan, but when Hendry comes back with word of equestrian Indians—the Blackfeet on horseback—and treeless plains, the English set him down as a lying impostor. Indians on horseback! They had never seen Indians but in canoes and on snowshoes! Hendry was dismissed as unreliable, and no Englishman went up the Saskatchewan for another ten years.
If the disasters of 1755 did nothing more, they at last stirred the home governments to action. Earl Loudon is sent out in 1756 to command the English, and to New France in May comes Louis Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, age forty-four, soldier, scholar, country gentleman, with a staff composed of Chevalier de Lévis, Bourlamaque, and one Bougainville, to become famous as a navigator.