Thus, across and along the border of this yet unbroken wilderness, the hostile bands of English and French and their Indian allies carried their murderous warfare to many an exposed settlement, and kept all in constant dread of attack.
Different routes were taken by the predatory bands in their descents upon the frontiers of New England. One was by the St. Francis River and Lake Memphremagog, thence to the Passumpsic, and down that river to the Connecticut, that gave an easy route to the settlements. Another was up the Winooski and down White River to the Connecticut. Another left Lake Champlain at the mouth of Great Otter Creek; then up its slow lower reaches to where it becomes a swift mountain stream, when the trail led to West River, or Wantasticook, emptying into the Connecticut. And still another way to West River and the Connecticut was from the head of the lake up the Pawlet River. Of these routes, that by the Winooski was so frequently taken that the English named the stream the French River; while that of which Otter Creek was a part, being the easiest and the nearest to Crown Point, was perhaps the oftenest used, and was commonly known as the "Indian Road."
All these familiar warpaths to every Waubanakee warrior, with every stream and landmark bearing names his fathers had given them, led through Vermont, then only known to English-speaking men as "The Wilderness."
The treaty of peace between England and France in 1697 gave the colonists a brief respite, till in 1702 war was again declared, and in the summer of the next year five hundred French and Indians assaulted in detachments the settlers on Casco Bay, and that part of the New England coast. In the following winter a force of three hundred French and Indians commanded by Hertel De Rouville, a skilled partisan leader, as had been his father, was dispatched by Vaudreuil, the governor of Canada, against Deerfield, then the northernmost settlement on the Connecticut. It was February, and Champlain was frozen throughout its length. Along it they marched as far as the mouth of the Winooski, and took this their accustomed path through the heart of the wilderness toward the Connecticut. Marching above the unseen and unheard flow of the river, over whose wintry silence bent the snow-laden branches of the graceful birch, the dark hemlock, and the fir, or along the hidden trail, an even whiteness except to the trained instinct of the Indian, seldom a sound came to them out of the forest save the echo of their own footsteps and voices. Sometimes they heard the resonant crack of trees under stress of frost, or the breaking of an over-laden bough, the whir of startled grouse, the sudden retreat of a deer or a giant moose tearing through the undergrowth; and sometimes they heard the stealthy tread of their brothers, the wolves, sneaking from some point of observation near their path, but in this remoteness from human haunts, and this deadness of winter, never a sound to alarm men so accustomed to all strange woodland noises. Then they came to the broad Connecticut, an open road to lead them to their victims, upon whom they fell in the early morning when the guards were asleep. Winter, the frequent ally of the Canadian bands, aided them now with snowdrifts heaped to the top of the low ramparts about the garrison houses, and upon them the assailants made entrance. All the inhabitants were slain or captured, the village plundered and set on fire, and an hour after sunrise the victorious party was on its way to Canada with its booty and wretched captives.[5]
Such warfare was waged for years, the French and Indians making frequent attacks on the most exposed settlements of the English, and they, at times, retaliating by invasions of the Canadian frontier. In 1709 another grand expedition was planned to operate against Canada in the same manner as that undertaken in 1690. But the troops, which under Nicholson were to advance by the way of Lake Champlain, got no farther than Wood Creek, where Winthrop's advance had ended nineteen years before, for while they were there awaiting the arrival at Boston of the English fleet, with which they were to coöperate, a terrible mortality[6] broke out among them, the fleet never came, and the undertaking was abandoned. In 1711 a still more formidable attempt was made to conquer Canada. But the fleet, commanded by Sir Hovenden Walker, with nine thousand troops on board, met with disaster in the St. Lawrence, and the land force, which again under Nicholson was to invade the French province by Lake Champlain, was not far beyond Albany when news of the fleet's disaster reached it and it was disbanded. Thus, as miserably as had the two preceding ones, this third attempt to conquer Canada failed, and a heavier cloud of humiliation and discouragement overcast the English colonies. But after the treaty of Utrecht the eastern Indians made a treaty of peace with the governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire which gave some assurance of tranquillity to the long-suffering people of those provinces.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Indians themselves pronounce the word as here given. It signifies The White Land. It has been thought better to follow this, than the more common spelling, Abenaki, which has come to us from the French.
[2] Wohjahose, signifying The Forbidder, is the Waubanakee name of Rock Dunder, which was supposed to be the guardian spirit of Petowbowk. Some dire calamity was certain to befall those who passed his abode without making some propitiatory offering.
[3] Petowbowk, interpreted by some "Alternate Land and Water," by others, "The Water that Lies Between," is the Waubanakee name of Lake Champlain.
[4] Doc. Hist. N. Y. vol. ii. p. 160.