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By nine o’clock next morning, the 15th day of August, the French had arrived at Willard’s headquarters, where they in number about twenty were ordered into one of the nearby houses. They came, it seems, cheerful and happy and without the slightest apprehension of their impending fate. With them now safely in his power and beyond the reach of harm, Willard dispatched forty of his men to destroy Remsheg,* twelve miles away to the West. Two parties were sent out to that place; Lewis with twenty men went by water in canoes; Ensign Willard with twenty others by land. Each had a Frenchman as a pilot. After these detachments had gone, Willard ordered his remaining sixty men to surround the house, where the French were confined and to make a thorough search of the other houses and buildings for guns, several of which they found. Finally having placed sentries outside, so that none could escape, Willard himself went into the house to tell the entrapped prisoners the fate which awaited them. What happened then can best be told only in the words
of Willard himself, the man who devised, directed and was an eye witness to what
followed, and who, probably upon the spot, wrote its factual account in his
simple, narrative style. Back |
