The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [32]
The trip became even worse during the first week of October. Greenman wrote on October 6, “Carried [boats] . . . one mile and a quarter over roots and rocks and mud . . . got some oxen to carry a few of our barrels over the carrying place.” With no local farmers to ask for directions and the maps confusing, the next day the army took a wrong turn and became utterly lost. On the following day, it rained continuously as the men walked for eight long miles. Private Greenman and the other enlisted men, heads down, trekked forward the best they could, feet stumbling on rocks at times, plodding through six inches of mud at others, rain coming down on them in thick sheets. Greenman, fed up with the trip already, scrawled in his journal that he and the soldiers had “entered an uncultivated country and a barren wilderness.”
It was a striking wilderness, though. When they were old men, Greenman and the others talked with awe about the gorgeous waterfalls, lakes, and mountaintops they passed on the expedition. On that first day they stopped to gawk at Three Mile Falls, one of the loveliest the men had ever seen, and after that there were more, climaxed by the falls at the end of the Chaudière River that tumbled 135 feet down into the rushing waters of the St. Lawrence. Once the Kennebec ran over Three Mile Falls it became quiet for a few miles and then rumbled down into a mountain gorge with high stone walls and collections of heavy rocks for several hundred yards, the water creating a thunderous roar as it rushed through.
The men marched through meadows of waist-high grass and looked up at the chain of mountains that surrounded them, tops covered with snow. They followed narrow paths through thick forests of evergreen trees and traipsed over the leaves that had fallen from oak, maple, and beech trees.
They found that the roads that appeared on the maps did not exist and they had to build them. Wrote Greenman, “Employed ourselves in making a sort of a road through the woods so that we might get our bateaux and provisions along.” An added difficulty the entire army faced was the lack of expertise in tasks like constructing roads. Arnold had three hundred frontiersmen from Virginia and Pennsylvania under Colonel Daniel Morgan, but the rest were simple farmers. Now, in the middle of nowhere, they had to perform tasks with which they were not familiar; their labors became time consuming and frustrating. The men from New England were accustomed to snow, but the temperatures that winter were far below normal and in the mountain ranges of the area they remained low for days, freezing the snow on the ground. The earth was slippery to walk over for weeks. The soldiers from Virginia had never seen snowfalls or cold spells such as the ones they encountered on the trip.
Much of the food the soldiers carried to sustain them was ruined during those first few weeks because of misplanning and misfortune. Large supplies of cod fish were all left in the bottoms of the boats and the fresh river water that spilled into the craft from the Kennebec destroyed them. Shabbily built barrels of dry bread were similarly ruined when the water seeped into them, as were barrels of peas.
The bateaux had been manufactured in haste for the invasion and constantly sprung leaks. Complained George Morison, a private from Pennsylvania, “Many of the bateaux were so badly constructed that in them or out of them, we were wet. Could we have then come within reach of the villains who constructed these crazy things, they would fully have experienced the effects of our vengeance.”7
The men began to fall sick; some died. Dr. Isaac Senter, the physician accompanying the expedition, reported on October 12, a week’s marching time before the men would reach the aptly named Dead River, that many soldiers had