|
It is a mixed metaphor but when Willard put the flame to the French villages, he indeed put the "poison’d chalice" to his own lips; for the British conquest of French America made possible the way to the Revolution, and out of the Revolution came ruin and exile to Willard. After a march of about three miles, Willard reached another small French settlement of four houses and several fine barns. Where this settlement was it is impossible to make out from Willard’s sketchy account. We know definitely that other than the French settlement at the meeting of the Rivers, there were small, so-called villages up the French River, on Waugh’s River, on Dewar’s River, and at what is now McConnell’s Creek at Barrachois. And in all probability there were others. The one at Dewar’s River presumably had been destroyed by Ensign Willard the day before on his way to Remsheg, and that left the ones up French River, on Waugh’s River and at McConnell’s undisposed of. However, as Willard estimated the distance as twenty-two miles from this village to Isgonish, it is likely that it was the one on Waugh's River or that Willard doubling back had revisited the settlement where Boyes lived on the French River. The one on Waugh’s River extended and had clearings of a kind from near the head of the tide water, where its dykes can yet be seen, upstream at least so far as the Mine Hole, where the French had worked at the mining of copper ore. Back |
