The First American Army (11 page)

As they traveled up the Kennebec River, Benedict Arnold’s eleven hundred men immediately ran into difficulties. The boats of green pine were not well built. “Our canoes proved very leaky,” Arnold complained in his journal.
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Just ten days into the expedition the men were forced to carry supplies and their boats more than one mile around a series of fastrunning rapids on the Kennebec River, a much greater distance than indicated on the maps. It would not be the first time. Private Jeremiah Greenman wrote that they had bigger problems. “We were obliged to draw our boats over shoals; in many places up to our arms in water and so swift that we could hardly stand.” He added that the terrain in the region surrounding the Kennebec was dreadful. “Nothing but rock and roots and a swamp.”

The trip became even worse during the first week of October. Greenman wrote on October 6, “Carried [boats] . . . one mile and a quarter over roots and rocks and mud . . . got some oxen to carry a few of our barrels over the carrying place.” With no local farmers to ask for directions and the maps confusing, the next day the army took a wrong turn and became utterly lost. On the following day, it rained continuously as the men walked for eight long miles. Private Greenman and the other enlisted men, heads down, trekked forward the best they could, feet stumbling on rocks at times, plodding through six inches of mud at others, rain coming down on them in thick sheets. Greenman, fed up with the trip already, scrawled in his journal that he and the soldiers had “entered an uncultivated country and a barren wilderness.”

It was a striking wilderness, though. When they were old men, Greenman and the others talked with awe about the gorgeous waterfalls, lakes, and mountaintops they passed on the expedition. On that first day they stopped to gawk at Three Mile Falls, one of the loveliest the men had ever seen, and after that there were more, climaxed by the falls at the end of the Chaudière River that tumbled 135 feet down into the rushing waters of the St. Lawrence. Once the Kennebec ran over Three Mile Falls it became quiet for a few miles and then rumbled down into a mountain gorge with high stone walls and collections of heavy rocks for several hundred yards, the water creating a thunderous roar as it rushed through.

The men marched through meadows of waist-high grass and looked up at the chain of mountains that surrounded them, tops covered with snow. They followed narrow paths through thick forests of evergreen trees and traipsed over the leaves that had fallen from oak, maple, and beech trees.

They found that the roads that appeared on the maps did not exist and they had to build them. Wrote Greenman, “Employed ourselves in making a sort of a road through the woods so that we might get our bateaux and provisions along.” An added difficulty the entire army faced was the lack of expertise in tasks like constructing roads. Arnold had three hundred frontiersmen from Virginia and Pennsylvania under Colonel Daniel Morgan, but the rest were simple farmers. Now, in the middle of nowhere, they had to perform tasks with which they were not familiar; their labors became time consuming and frustrating. The men from New England were accustomed to snow, but the temperatures that winter were far below normal and in the mountain ranges of the area they remained low for days, freezing the snow on the ground. The earth was slippery to walk over for weeks. The soldiers from Virginia had never seen snowfalls or cold spells such as the ones they encountered on the trip.

Much of the food the soldiers carried to sustain them was ruined during those first few weeks because of misplanning and misfortune. Large supplies of cod fish were all left in the bottoms of the boats and the fresh river water that spilled into the craft from the Kennebec destroyed them. Shabbily built barrels of dry bread were similarly ruined when the water seeped into them, as were barrels of peas.

The bateaux had been manufactured in haste for the invasion and constantly sprung leaks. Complained George Morison, a private from Pennsylvania, “Many of the bateaux were so badly constructed that in them or out of them, we were wet. Could we have then come within reach of the villains who constructed these crazy things, they would fully have experienced the effects of our vengeance.”
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The men began to fall sick; some died. Dr. Isaac Senter, the physician accompanying the expedition, reported on October 12, a week’s marching time before the men would reach the aptly named Dead River, that many soldiers had come down with dysentery and diarrhea and that the water in their barrels had gone bad. He wrote, “No sooner had it got down than it was puked up by many of the poor fellows.”
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Greenman fought his way through clusters of bushes and trees. The clearings were littered with stones and the paths that did exist were covered with fallen trees and brush. One clearing they traversed at the bottom of a ridge was very swampy and strewn with lengthy rotted-out logs that they had to step over. When they approached the Chaudière River, they had to push their way through jungles of spruce, cedar, and hemlock trees and cross deep and winding ravines that nature had slashed into the slopes of the hills near the water.

Their grittiness and determination, hallmarks of the entire American army throughout the Revolution and in the years to come, was evident to Arnold, who marveled at the way the enlisted men plunged through the forests. “Our men,” he noted, “are very much fatigued in carrying over their bateaux, provisions. The roads being extremely bad . . . They appear very cheerful . . . Their spirit and industry seem to overcome every obstacle.”
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The divisions of troops became easy victims of the terrain. Dozens of bateaux had been so badly damaged that they had to be left behind. Supplies had to be put in all of the boats and about half the men on the expedition were forced to walk, not ride, as the army moved ever northwards toward Canada. Their coats were ripped by branches and soon could not protect the men from the wind and cold. Their shoes were cut up, too, by the jagged rocks in the streams they traversed, and by the time they approached the headwaters of the Dead River many had become barefoot.

Exhausted upon their arrival at the Dead River, an extension of the Kennebec, on October 20, the men were drenched by a heavy rain that grew in intensity all day and by nightfall, aided by south by southwest winds, became a full-blown storm. Meandering nearby creeks began to overflow and swiftly running water surged over the banks of the river and shores of the ponds and tore through the woods. The strong winds knocked over dozens of large trees. The men scrambled into clearings to avoid falling trees but were afraid to put up tents for fear that the winds would knock them over and injure the inhabitants. Many simply laid on the open ground in clearings, huddled against each other, hats pulled down over their heads, coats wrapped tightly around them, and sat out the storm. Despite gallant effort to save them, the soldiers lost dozens of barrels of flour, pork, and other supplies that were carried away by the badly flooding ponds.

The men found themselves in the center of a calamitous natural disaster when the sun rose over the rain-soaked countryside in the morning. The ponds, now lakes, and the overflowing Dead River flooded out many of the landmark trails and creeks on Arnold’s previous maps and the men did not know what direction to take. Several divisions, including Greenman’s, became lost, some for as long as a day, before backtracking to the main army.
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Others ignored Arnold’s orders to walk on high ground, above the new shorelines created by the overflowing water. To save time they waded through the three feet deep waters of the “ocean swamp,” as Greenman called it. The freezing waters soon made their legs and lower bodies numb and they had to leave the water, find high ground, and then dry off. They all rested to regain circulation in their legs, which caused further delays.
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Dissension over the weather, lack of food, bad maps, and general mismanagement of the army had grown throughout the trip, especially among the last two divisions in the expedition, led by Lt. Col. Christopher Greene and Colonel Roger Enos, whose divisions had suffered the most from lack of food, sickness, and lost bateaux. A few days after the Dead River flooded, on October 25, following a storm that dumped several inches of snow on the ground, the officers of both divisions called a council of war to determine whether they should go on or turn back, an action that verged on mutiny. Many of the officers and men were panicstricken following the series of natural disasters that had befallen them.

After a lengthy discussion at the council, held in a wide clearing, Greene and Enos urged the men to catch up with Arnold, regardless of the dangers. Others vigorously argued that they should go home because to advance meant certain death. Greene, angry at the men who wanted to depart, reminded them that both he and Enos had received letters that very day from Arnold assuring them that they would arrive in Quebec within fifteen days. Greene reminded them that it would take them more than fifteen days to get back home.

The colonel’s strident lecture did little good. The officers in Greene’s division voted to go on, but Enos’s officers decided to go home. Enos’s companies, totaling three hundred men, or nearly one-third of the entire force, left the following morning and made it back to the coast in eleven days. Enos was brought before a court of inquiry for desertion, but acquitted following emphatic testimony by his officers that they firmly believed that, under-supplied, they would perish in the wilds of Maine.

The men who remained in the expedition, knowing that the departure of Enos’s men weakened their forces, were angry. The men of Captain Henry Dearborn’s company even prayed out loud that the men going back with Enos would die on the way as punishment for abandoning them in the middle of the wilderness.
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It was here, too, that the unhappy men, with nothing left to eat, first discussed killing the dogs that had accompanied them, many of them personal pets, in order to stay alive. It was a disturbing conversation, but one they felt necessary, even though they did not think they would actually do so. Surely they would find food.

The Dead River was the halfway point on the trip, and when he reached it on October 25, Arnold was furious that it had turned out to be twice the distance from the mouth of the Kennebec that the maps showed. Quebec, too, was not one hundred eighty miles from the sea, but closer to three hundred sixty miles. They were already seven days behind schedule and had consumed most of their provisions, which were soon cut to half rations. Arnold, ever cautious, had, in fact, feared problems with supplies and taken along 50 percent more than he believed he would need. The additional supplies were now nearly gone, too.

The Dead River began with a series of ponds much farther apart than Montresor’s maps indicated. All in all, the men, now reduced to about seven hundred with the loss of Enos’s troops, had to carry their boats and remaining supplies nearly eight miles between two of the ponds and it debilitated them. Greenman was done in. He observed, “[Men] were greatly fatigued by carrying over such hills, mountains, and swamps such as men never passed before.”

Life did not improve when they reached the Chaudière River, the watery path to Quebec, eighty miles away. It, too, ran too fast for the leaky bateaux and exhausted men. The bateaux with the sick troops loaded into them could not be maneuvered by the healthy men assigned to pilot them and had to be taken out of the river. The sick then had to walk several miles and help carry their boats. One man was lost, along with dozens of guns and several thousand dollars stashed into a sack, when his bateaux overturned with two others in one of the rapids in the Chaudière.

The men began to kill and eat their dogs that same night, during their fifth week on the expedition. Greenman was so hungry that he put the animal cannibalism out of his mind. Greenman wrote of the dog, “I got a small piece of it and some broth that it was boiled in with a great deal of trouble.” On the following day, the men learned that those in another company, and in a third, had also killed and devoured their pet dogs. By November 1, Greenman was writing in his journal that food was so scarce “there was nothing to eat but dogs.”

But there was, as the hungry men discovered. Some men boiled their cartridge pouches and others their moccasins and ate them. The men in one division removed all of the candlesticks they had been carrying for light in the evening and had them for dinner. Others gleefully consumed lip salve and slender chunks of shaving soap that they carved off the bars with their knives.

It was the lowest point in their lives and they feared dying in a grim, desolate wilderness hundreds of miles from their loved ones. Private Abner Stocking walked through the camp that morning and saw men “so weak that they could hardly stand on their legs.” They were despondent, he wrote, “many sitting wholly drowned in sorrow, wishfully placing their eyes on everyone who passed by them, hoping for some relief. Such pity-asking countenances I never before held. My heart was ready to burst and my eyes to overflow with tears when I witnessed distress which I could not relieve.”

Private Morison observed that “the universal weakness of body that now prevailed over every man increased hourly on account of the total destitution of food; and the craggy mounds over which we had to pass, together with the snow and the cold penetrating through our death-like frames made our situation completely wretched and nothing but death was wanting to finish our sufferings.”
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Finally, on October 30, forty-two days after they began their journey, Benedict Arnold, leading an advance scouting party searching for food, arrived at the first of several houses near the Chaudière. There he was able to procure from a local farmer a number of cattle for his men, which they first saw a day later when they encountered the advance scouts on their return. The men were delirious with happiness. Greenman wrote, “It was the most joyful sight I ever saw and some could not refrain from crying for joy. Some of the men were so hungry before the creatures [cattle] were dressed that they had the skin and all entrails guts and everything that could be eaten on the fires a-boiling.”