The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [34]
After a lengthy discussion at the council, held in a wide clearing, Greene and Enos urged the men to catch up with Arnold, regardless of the dangers. Others vigorously argued that they should go home because to advance meant certain death. Greene, angry at the men who wanted to depart, reminded them that both he and Enos had received letters that very day from Arnold assuring them that they would arrive in Quebec within fifteen days. Greene reminded them that it would take them more than fifteen days to get back home.
The colonel’s strident lecture did little good. The officers in Greene’s division voted to go on, but Enos’s officers decided to go home. Enos’s companies, totaling three hundred men, or nearly one-third of the entire force, left the following morning and made it back to the coast in eleven days. Enos was brought before a court of inquiry for desertion, but acquitted following emphatic testimony by his officers that they firmly believed that, under-supplied, they would perish in the wilds of Maine.
The men who remained in the expedition, knowing that the departure of Enos’s men weakened their forces, were angry. The men of Captain Henry Dearborn’s company even prayed out loud that the men going back with Enos would die on the way as punishment for abandoning them in the middle of the wilderness.12
It was here, too, that the unhappy men, with nothing left to eat, first discussed killing the dogs that had accompanied them, many of them personal pets, in order to stay alive. It was a disturbing conversation, but one they felt necessary, even though they did not think they would actually do so. Surely they would find food.
The Dead River was the halfway point on the trip, and when he reached it on October 25, Arnold was furious that it had turned out to be twice the distance from the mouth of the Kennebec that the maps showed. Quebec, too, was not one hundred eighty miles from the sea, but closer to three hundred sixty miles. They were already seven days behind schedule and had consumed most of their provisions, which were soon cut to half rations. Arnold, ever cautious, had, in fact, feared problems with supplies and taken along 50 percent more than he believed he would need. The additional supplies were now nearly gone, too.
The Dead River began with a series of ponds much farther apart than Montresor’s maps indicated. All in all, the men, now reduced to about seven hundred with the loss of Enos’s troops, had to carry their boats and remaining supplies nearly eight miles between two of the ponds and it debilitated them. Greenman was done in. He observed, “[Men] were greatly fatigued by carrying over such hills, mountains, and swamps such as men never passed before.”
Life did not improve when they reached the Chaudière River, the watery path to Quebec, eighty miles away. It, too, ran too fast for the leaky bateaux and exhausted men. The bateaux with the sick troops loaded into them could not be maneuvered by the healthy men assigned to pilot them and had to be taken out of the river. The sick then had to walk several miles and help carry their boats. One man was lost, along with dozens of guns and several thousand dollars stashed into a sack, when his bateaux overturned with two others in one of the rapids in the Chaudière.
The men began to kill and eat their dogs that same night, during their fifth week on the expedition. Greenman was so hungry that he put the animal cannibalism out of his mind. Greenman wrote of the dog, “I got a small piece of it and some broth that it was boiled in with a great deal of trouble.” On the following day, the men learned that those in another company, and in a third, had also killed and devoured their pet dogs. By November 1, Greenman was writing in his journal that food was so scarce “there was nothing to eat but dogs.”
But there was, as the hungry men discovered. Some men boiled their cartridge pouches and others their moccasins