| He commands the expedition against Crown Point. Building of Fort Edward. |
When it was decided to send an expedition against Crown Point, Shirley gave him the command, and Braddock confirmed the appointment. He had no military experience, though he was a colonel of militia; but the whole force under him consisted of colonists, preferring to be led by a man who knew the country and its people than by a trained soldier. Preparations were made for raising 6,000 to 7,000 men. Massachusetts, as usual, contributed the largest levy; the other New England colonies and New York sent or promised smaller forces, and some 300 Mohawk Indians joined the expedition, finding that it was commanded by the white man, whom of all others they trusted and loved. The actual numbers engaged, however, did not much exceed 3,000 fighting men. In July they met at Albany and moved up the Hudson, for about forty-five miles, to the 'Carrying Place,' the spot where the portage begins to the waters which run to the St. Lawrence. Here, on the eastern side of the Hudson, a beginning was made of a fort, called for the time Fort Lyman, after Phineas Lyman, second in command of the expedition, but a little later rechristened Fort Edward.
| Course of the Hudson. |
The Hudson river rises in the Adirondack mountains, to the west of Lake George, and flows in a south-easterly direction, until it reaches a point south-west by south of the southern end of the lake. Here for some miles it takes a due easterly course, at right angles to the line of the lake, until, at Sandy Hill, near where Fort Edward was founded, it turns due south, and flows due south into the Atlantic. It appears to prolong to southward the line of Lake George and Lake Champlain; but the watersheds are distinct, the two lakes in question drain to the north, and eventually discharge through the Richelieu river into the St. Lawrence.
| Lakes George and Champlain. |
They form a long narrow basin running north and south between the Adirondacks on the west and the Green mountains of Vermont on the east. No stream of any size feeds Lake George; it stretches for between thirty and forty miles from south-west to north-east, overshadowed by the Adirondacks; and, narrowing at the northern end, finds an outlet into Lake Champlain by a semicircular channel, which enters the larger lake from west to east. This channel is broken by rapids, and in the angle which it forms with Lake Champlain stands Ticonderoga.
Lake Champlain is here a broad river rather than a lake, having narrowed into the similitude of a river from where, fifteen miles further north, the isthmus of Crown Point juts out on the western side of the lake. But it does not end at Ticonderoga, where it meets the waters of Lake George. It continues southwards in a direct line, very roughly parallel to Lake George, still narrowing in its upward course, through the marshes known as the Drowned Lands, past a little subsidiary lake on the western side known as South Bay, over against which now stands the small town of Whitehall, and ending in a stream known as Wood Creek. The sources of Wood Creek are but a few miles distant from the point, already noted, where the Hudson turns south to form the central valley of New York State, and where Johnson, in the summer of 1755, was busy constructing Fort Lyman.
| Johnson encamps at the end of Lake George. |
Johnson's objective was Crown Point; and to reach it he had a choice of two parallel routes, either of which involved a portage from the Hudson watershed to that of Lake Champlain. He could take either the western line by Lake George, or the eastern line by Wood Creek. He chose the former, and making a road for fourteen miles from Fort Lyman to the head—the southern end—of Lake George, encamped there at the end of August with over 2,000 men, leaving 500 men behind to garrison Fort Lyman.