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1. The British Occupation of the West
- University of Nebraska Press
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[First Page [1], (1) Lines: 0 to ——— 0.0pt P ——— Normal Pa PgEnds: T [1], (1)« 1 » The British Occupation of the West The surrender of French forces at Montreal on September 8, 1760, brought the fighting in North America to an end. Nevertheless, for Sir Jeffery Amherst’s victorious armies there was still much to do: regiments had to be assigned winter quarters in Canada, provincial troops had to be sent home, and several thousand French and Canadian soldiers had to be disarmed, paroled, or held until they could be sent out of the colony as prisoners of war. Equally important, news of the capitulation had to be carried to distant French outposts and those forts provided with British garrisons in order to ensure, as Amherst later put it, “a quiet possession of the whole” of Canada. This task fell to Maj. Robert Rogers and his now-famous corps of rangers. With some 200 men, a Canadian guide, Joseph Poupao, dit La Fleur, and engineer Lt. Dietrich Brehm to take soundings and make maps, Rogers was ordered to cross the Great Lakes to Detroit, accept the town’s surrender, then occupy as many of the outlying forts as he could. It was a tall order. Winter came early in the pays d’en haut, and it was a region inhabited by Indian societies that had been French allies and commercial partners for years—they were unlikely to welcome news that their French “father” had been driven from Canada. On November 13 Rogers and his men left Montreal in a flotilla of the light, maneuverable whaleboats rangers favored. Ten days later, having passed through the stunning maze of the Thousand Islands, they landed at Cataraqui and made ready for the first leg of their journey through the inland seas: the trip across Lake Ontario to Fort Niagara.1 Crossing the Great Lakes in boats with only a few inches of freeboard was altogether different from the rangers’ forays down the narrow Champlain corridor. An officer who crossed Lake Erie a year earlier found the experience “Extreamly Hazardous, and Dangerous” since the “slightest wind” whipping across the shallow water produced high waves. Indeed, the rangers were held up for two days at Cataraqui because of what Rogers called the “tempestuousness of the weather,” which brought alternating squalls of 2 british occupation of the west [2], (2) Lines: 5 ——— 0.181 ——— Norma PgEnds [2], (2) 3. General Thomas Gage, commander in chief in North America, 1763–75. (Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.) snow and rain as well as dense fog. Altogether Rogers’s force lost nine days’ travel to foul weather during their seventy-two-day passage to Detroit.2 When Rogers’s men arrived at Fort Niagara on October 2, the garrison there attempted to use draft horses to haul boats and bulk supplies up the Lewiston escarpment—with little success. The animals were so weakened by lack of proper forage that soldiers “were obliged to do the whole,” and their labor resulted in ruptures, bruised backs, and exhaustion so severe that men were unable to “do Any one thing for three Days” after duty on the road. The work was still not finished on October 5 when Rogers, fearing that “the winter season was now advancing very fast,” left his men to follow as best they could and hurried on with a small party to Fort Pitt, where he was to receive further orders from Gen. Robert Monckton and pick up additional troops to man the new western garrisons.3 Following the south shore of Lake Erie, Rogers’s party came first to british occupation of the west 3 [3], (3) Lines: 55 t ——— 0.0pt P ——— Normal Pa PgEnds: T [3], (3) Fort Presque Isle; they then followed the Allegheny Valley to Fort Pitt and General Monckton. Three days later, on October 20, the major was on his way north, up the Allegheny, followed by Capt. Donald Campbell and 100 men of the Royal American Regiment. By the end of October Rogers and Campbell were at Lake Erie, where they found the main body of rangers attempting to repair several boats damaged on the way from Niagara. Campbell’s regulars, though hardened by long service in South Carolina and the Ohio Country, had serious reservations about traveling across the choppy lake, forcing Rogers to “recommend” to them “not to mind the waves of the lake” but “to stick to their oars...