It was soon after eight o’clock when Ephraim Williams left the camp with his regiment, marched a little distance, and then waited for the rest of the detachment under Lieutenant-Colonel Whiting.  Thus Dieskau had full time to lay his ambush.  When Whiting came up, the whole moved on together, so little conscious of danger that no scouts were thrown out in front or flank; and, in full security, they entered the fatal snare.  Before they were completely involved in it, the sharp eye of old Hendrick detected some sign of an enemy.  At that instant, whether by accident or design, a gun was fired from the bushes.  It is said that Dieskau’s Iroquois, seeing Mohawks, their relatives, in the van, wished to warn them of danger.  If so, the warning came too late.  The thickets on the left blazed out a deadly fire, and the men fell by scores.  In the words of Dieskau, the head of the column “was doubled up like a pack of cards.”  Hendrick’s horse was shot down, and the chief was killed with a bayonet as he tried to rise.  Williams, seeing a rising ground on his right, made for it, calling on his men to follow; but as he climbed the slope, guns flashed from the bushes, and a shot through the brain laid him dead.  The men in the rear pressed forward to support their comrades, when a hot fire was suddenly opened on them from the forest along their right flank.  Then there was a panic; some fled outright, and the whole column recoiled.  The van now became the rear, and all the force of the enemy rushed upon it, shouting and screeching.  There was a moment of total confusion; but a part of Williams’s regiment rallied under command of Whiting, and covered the retreat, fighting behind trees like Indians, and firing and falling back by turns, bravely aided by some of the Mohawks and by a detachment which Johnson sent to their aid.  “And a very handsome retreat they made,” writes Pomeroy; “and so continued till they came within about three quarters of a mile of our camp.  This was the last fire our men gave our enemies, which killed great numbers of them; they were seen to drop as pigeons.”  So ended the fray long known in New England fireside story as the “bloody morning scout.”  Dieskau now ordered a halt, and sounded his trumpets to collect his scattered men.  His Indians, however, were sullen and unmanageable, and the Canadians also showed signs of wavering.  The veteran who commanded them all, Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, had been killed.  At length they were persuaded to move again, the regulars leading the way.

About an hour after Williams and his men had begun their march, a distant rattle of musketry was heard at the camp; and as it grew nearer and louder, the listeners knew that their comrades were on the retreat.  Then, at the eleventh hour, preparations were begun for defence.  A sort of barricade was made along the front of the camp, partly of wagons, and partly of inverted bateaux, but chiefly of the trunks of trees hastily hewn down in the neighboring forest and laid