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wanted to take Canada. His initial plan was to send General Philip Schuyler there from Albany at the head of a fifteen hundred man force to launch a two-pronged attack. Arnold insisted on showing him another plan and the commander in chief was intrigued. As a trader, the colonel told Washington, he had visited Quebec by ship and sailed up and down the coast of New England and knew well the Kennebec River, in Maine, then part of the Massachusetts colony. He had obtained copies of journals and maps drawn in the French and Indian War by British colonel John Montresor, including Montresor’s charts of water and land routes between the Kennebec and Quebec, charts with which the commander in chief was familiar. With Washington listening intently, Arnold proposed journeying to Quebec via an unusual route up the Kennebec—from its mouth in the Atlantic Ocean to the Chaudière River, past the ominously named Dead River, to Quebec. His requested force of one thousand men would have to cover about one hundred eighty miles on land and water and trek across several low mountain ranges, but they would surprise the British at Quebec and conquer the walled-in city.4 On paper, the plan seemed feasible.

There were weaknesses. It would take seven or eight weeks to reach Canada and the men would have to march through the mountainous regions in early winter, a season that could bring numerous snowfalls and freezing temperatures for soldiers who had never marched that far in inclement weather. An army might live off the land in summer, but it could not do so in winter. No one took into consideration the snow in the mountains and the flooding of the rivers and lakes in the area following lengthy and often ferocious rainstorms. The maps did not indicate the many churning rapids and high waterfalls around which the men would have to carry sixty-five tons of supplies and their two hundred bateaux— flat-bottomed boats that carried eight men each. Maps of the area were not accurate and the distances between places in the country were actually far greater than they appeared on them. The charts showed rivers and ponds, but did not note their true depths. There were hardly any villages, farms, or people in that northeastern area of New England who could provide supplies if necessary.5 If the expedition became lost or trapped by snowstorms, they would be too far away from any towns for rescue.

General Schuyler never made it to Canada. His army of fifteen hundred began its journey on August 30, but Schuyler fell ill with scurvy and rheumatism halfway there and was forced to return to Fort Ticonderoga, replaced by his second in command, the energetic General Richard Montgomery.

The charismatic Montgomery, thirty-seven, was the son of a member of the Irish parliament who had served in the British army for years before moving to America in 1772 and marrying the daughter of wealthy New Yorker Robert Livingston. He was determined to spend the rest of his life as a gentleman farmer, but joined the Continental Army when the war began. Assisted by reinforcements, Montgomery, an experienced commander, defeated British and Canadian forces at Chambly and St. John’s in Canada and on November 13 seized Montreal. The city only had one hundred fifty men in it; most were captured. The head of the province, Governor Guy Carleton, a British general, had left Montreal two days before it surrendered. He raced to Quebec to help fortify that city. Montgomery left men in Montreal to hold the town and marched toward Quebec, the first part of the plan a great success.

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.6 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