Patriot on the Kennebec: Major Reuben Colburn, Benedict Arnold and the March to Quebec, 1775 by Mark A. York

Author:Mark A. York
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

INTO THE SWAMPS OF CHAUDIÈRE POND

Guided by Colburn’s scouts, the divisions moved on after the flood as best they could. Arnold made it to the first of the Chain of Ponds on October 25 “quite early in the forenoon.”1 It was blustery and snowing. The night before, it “rained and snowed all night,” Arnold wrote.2 Arnold’s party rowed two miles where the lake narrowed before opening up for the same distance, ending in a “marshy ground.” After a mile of river, he came to another pond “about five miles long.”3 The lakes are Lower, Bag, Round, Horseshoe and Moosehorn.

“All these lakes are surrounded within a chain of prodigious high mountains,” he wrote.4 As they struggled from pond to pond and into Horseshoe Stream, the wind and snow continued to pound them. “In the last lake the sea ran so high we were obliged to go on shore to bail our battoes, which was with much difficulty kept above water.”5 Heavily laden and in high, windblown waves, it’s hard to imagine a craft that could have accomplished this trip without difficulty. They had to search hard for the portages and cut their way through piles of drift logs, becoming soaked and nearly frozen in the process.

On October 26, Arnold came to the end of Moosehorn Pond that now bears his name and the start of the carrying place over the Height of Land and into Chaudière Pond. The country was hellish, with great swaths of blow-downs they had to skirt and then return to the course; mire holes, swamps, treacherous bogs and thickets where dead twigs snap into one’s eyes; precipices and ravines.6

Arnold climbed the portage much the worse for wear and worried about those behind him. At the top was “a beautiful meadow.” Here, he ran into twenty of the advance men from Lieutenant Church and Steele’s company. While they continued to ferry up the gear over the portage, Arnold sent back Nehemiah Getchell, another of Colburn’s scouts, to see the rest through.7

The food situation would, of course, become dire or even deadly for some. Greene’s division was already boiling moose hide shot pouches at their camp below present-day Eustis. Arnold by this time was over the height of land and had sent Captain Oliver Handchitt ahead to Quebec with orders to procure supplies from the Canadians, but he soon passed him. He sent Isaac Hull,8 one of Colburn’s scouts with Getchell and Berry,9 back to those waiting in the meadow with the instructions, but it did no good, because the message missed10 some of the men who already had set out. These were Dearborn’s, Goodrich’s, Smith’s and Ward’s companies.11 Hull was to guide the fourth division in the rear after delivering the message, but they retreated before he arrived.12

The ordeal by Lac Megantic was close to horrific. Division after division became mired and ultimately lost in myriad channels, miles of blown-down spruce and swamps of the Arnold (Seven-Mile Stream) and Spider Rivers. Arnold had warned of this, but his message wasn’t heeded.

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