This form of attack had proved most successful eighteen
years earlier when the British had finally secured Canada by
bringing together, at Montreal, three armies, one from the east,
one from the west, and one from the south. Now there was a
similar plan of bringing together three British forces at or near
Albany, on the Hudson. Of Clinton, at New York, and Burgoyne we
know. The third force was under General St. Leger. With some
seventeen hundred men, fully half of whom were Indians, he had
gone up the St. Lawrence from Montreal and was advancing from
Oswego on Lake Ontario to attack Fort Stanwix at the end of the
road from the Great Lakes to the Mohawk River. After taking that
stronghold he intended to go down the river valley to meet
Burgoyne near Albany.
On the 3d of August St. Leger was before Fort Stanwix garrisoned
by some seven hundred Americans. With him were two men deemed
potent in that scene. One of these was Sir John Johnson who had
recently inherited the vast estate in the neighborhood of his
father, the great Indian Superintendent, Sir William Johnson, and
was now in command of a regiment recruited from Loyalists, many
of them fierce and embittered because of the seizure of their
property. The other leader was a famous chief of the Mohawks,
Thayendanegea, or, to give him his English name, Joseph Brant,
half savage still, but also half civilized and half educated,
because he had had a careful schooling and for a brief day had
been courted by London fashion.
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