Both sides lost heavily, but the balance of the day's fighting was unquestionably in favour of the English. On the French side the regulars showed to more advantage than their colonial and Indian allies, and Dieskau deserved a better fate than wounds and captivity. While lying wounded, we read, he was again shot by a French deserter, and, when he was brought into the English camp, the Mohawks, whose chief had been killed, threatened his life. Johnson, however, who had himself been wounded, took every care of his prisoner; in due course he was sent over to England; and eventually, disabled for further service, he returned to France, where he died in 1767.
| Results of the fight. Fort William Henry. |
The most was made of this repulse of the French. It came as a set-off to the defeat of Braddock. Johnson was made a baronet and received £5,000. The Lac du Sacrement he had already renamed Lake George, the encampment at the head of the lake blossomed out into Fort William Henry, and another of the King's sons provided the name of Fort Edward for the fort at the Carrying Place. Yet the object of the expedition was not achieved; no attempt was made at a further advance; the French were unmolested in their retreat, and retained their hold on Crown Point and Ticonderoga also. Johnson remained encamped by the lake, with a force raised to a total of 3,600 men, until November was drawing to a close, when, a garrison being left to hold Fort William Henry through the winter, the rest of the army disbanded to their homes.
| Shirley's advance to Lake Ontario. |
While Johnson was moving north from Albany to attack Crown Point, William Shirley went west, with the intention of reducing the French fort at Niagara and cutting off Canada from the upper lakes. He started from Albany in July with some 1,500 men, mainly colonial troops in Imperial pay, and took his way along the line of the Five Nation cantons. He moved up the Mohawk river, past Schenectady and past Johnson's home, made the portage from the Mohawk to the stream called, like the feeder of Lake Champlain, Wood or Wood's Creek, which runs into Lake Oneida, and by the outlet of that lake, now the Oswego river, to Lake Ontario.
| Oswego and Niagara. The expedition abandoned. |
Where the river joined Lake Ontario stood the small English fort of Oswego, founded in 1727, and regarded with the utmost jealousy by the French.13 The French fort at Niagara was 130 to 140 miles to the west of Oswego, while due north of the latter place, at a distance of over fifty miles across Lake Ontario, was Fort Frontenac. The garrisons of both the French forts had been reinforced on hearing of Shirley's advance, and an attack on Fort Niagara involved the danger of a counter attack on Oswego from Fort Frontenac. On the other hand, Fort Frontenac was fully strong enough to repel any direct attempt to take it. The English, moreover, experienced great difficulty in collecting provisions or an adequate fleet of boats, and after some weeks' delay it was resolved to abandon the expedition. Before October ended, Shirley returned to Albany by the way he went, leaving 700 men to garrison Oswego and strengthen its defences, communications with Albany being maintained by two blockhouses which had been built at either end of the four miles' portage between the Mohawk river and Wood Creek—Fort Williams on the Mohawk river, where the town of Rome now stands, and Fort Bull on Wood Creek.
13 See [above].
| Results of the year's campaign |
Thus the campaigning of the busy year 1755 came to an end. The main forces on either side disbanded, or went into garrison for the winter; Washington and a few hundred Virginians tried to safeguard the harried frontiers of the southern colonies; Robert Rogers, boldest of New England rangers, went scouting up the line of Lake George. The forts stood isolated in the wintry backwoods, waiting for the stirring times which were coming on forthwith.