CHAPTER III
FIRST TASTE OF WAR
Israel Putnam's adventure with the wolf gave him an unsought, and in some respects undesirable, notoriety; but that he did not court this notoriety is shown by the fact that for the next twelve or thirteen years he lived quietly on his farm, attending to his duties as a cultivator of the soil and a simple citizen. During these years he acquired an enviable reputation as one of the best farmers in all the region of which Pomfret was the center, and had it not been for the lamentable struggle between the French and the English for supremacy in North America, he might have continued as the humble and prosperous citizen-cultivator to the end of his days. The breaking out of the prolonged strife which is known in history as the French and Indian War, found Putnam in possession of what in those days was considered a competency. Having received a good start from the paternal inheritance, he had not hidden his talents in a napkin, but had put them out to good purpose. He erected a large and substantial dwelling about a fourth of a mile distant from the first he had built in Pomfret, and here he lived most happily, with his good wife Hannah, surrounded by a growing family of healthy children.
In the year 1755, when active operations began in this war between England and France, fought out on the soil of America, Israel Putnam was thirty-seven years old and in the prime of life. There was no immediate necessity for him to volunteer in defense of the frontier, where the hostile French were gathering, for it was far distant from his home, the forests around which were threatened by no roaming savages with tomahawks and muskets. But his patriotic instincts were aroused by the reports of massacres committed in other regions; he knew the tide must be met before it became irresistible and breasted in the North. Four great expeditions were planned by the English to frustrate the schemes of the enemy: against Fort Niagara, Crown Point on Lake Champlain, Fort Duquesne, and against the French in Nova Scotia.
It was to take part in the expedition with Crown Point as its objective that Israel Putnam abandoned his farm, early in the summer of 1755, just when it needed him most, and started on his second long journey away from home. He reached the rendezvous at Albany, after a toilsome march through the forests that intervened between the Connecticut and the Hudson, and there found three thousand other "Provincials" gathered for the defense of the colonies. Most of them were sons of the soil, like Putnam, and like him were yet to receive their baptism of fire; but they were sturdy and valiant, though appearing rude and uncouth in the eyes of the British veterans.
The commander-in-chief of the British Colonial forces in North America at the beginning of the war was Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts, and the commander of the Crown Point expedition was General William Johnson, the famous and eccentric "sachem" of the Mohawks. Having lived for many years with or near the Indians, this Englishman had acquired a great influence over them, especially over the Mohawks, of whose tribe he had been elected an honorary sachem. He had learned their language, had even adopted their peculiar garb, and at times adorned his face with war-paint and performed with his savage friends the furious war-dance. His stanch ally was the ever faithful chief of the Mohawks, the valiant Hendrick, who rendered invaluable service to the English and was killed while battling for their cause.
As Putnam, the stalwart provincial soldier, was merely a private in the ranks when he made the acquaintance of the famous general and the Mohawk chief, he may not have attracted their attention; though he later won encomiums from the commander. He could not but have admired the General's sagacity in retaining the Mohawks as allies of the English Colonials, when most of the Indian tribes had arrayed themselves on the side of the French. At the time Johnson was assembling his army on the Hudson, in that very month of July, 1755, General Braddock, commander of the Duquesne expedition, met with most disastrous defeat, and almost his last words were regrets that he had not taken the advice of his aide-de-camp, a "young Virginian colonel named Washington," who had earnestly besought him to abandon the British tactics and adopt the American system of "bush-fighting."
"We shall better know how to deal with them another time," the defeated Braddock had said to Washington, just before he died. But General Johnson and the Provincial officers already knew how to deal with their wily foes. They had taken leaves from the unwritten book of Indian tactics; their men fought from behind trees and logs, as the savages fought, and in this manner turned the tables upon the French commanders.