“The sons of Belial are too strong for me,” jocosely wrote Winslow;[441] and he set himself to intrenching his camp; then had the forest cut down for the space of a mile from the lake to the mountains, so that the trees, lying in what he calls a “promiscuous manner,” formed an almost impenetrable abatis.  An escaped prisoner told him that the French were coming to visit him with fourteen thousand men;[442] but Montcalm thought no more of stirring than Loudon himself; and each stood watching the other, with the lake between them, till the season closed.

[Footnote 440:  “Nous sommes tant a Carillon qu’aux postes avances 5,300 hommes.”  Bougainville, Journal.]

[Footnote 441:  Winslow to Loudon, 29 Sept. 1756.]

[Footnote 442:  Examination of Sergeant James Archibald.]

Meanwhile the western borders were still ravaged by the tomahawk.  New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia all writhed under the infliction.  Each had made a chain of blockhouses and wooden forts to cover its frontier, and manned them with disorderly bands, lawless, and almost beyond control.[443] The case was at the worst in Pennsylvania, where the tedious quarrelling of Governor and Assembly, joined to the doggedly pacific attitude of the Quakers, made vigorous defence impossible.  Rewards were offered for prisoners and scalps, so bountiful that the hunting of men would have been a profitable vocation, but for the extreme wariness and agility of the game.[444] Some of the forts were well built stockades; others were almost worthless; but the enemy rarely molested even the feeblest of them, preferring to ravage the lonely and unprotected farms.  There were two or three exceptions.  A Virginian fort was attacked by a war-party under an officer named Douville, who was killed, and his followers were put to flight.[445] The assailants were more fortunate at a small stockade called Fort Granville, on the Juniata.  A large body of French and Indians attacked it in August while most of the garrison were absent protecting the farmers at their harvest; they set it on fire, and, in spite of a most gallant resistance by the young lieutenant left in command, took it, and killed all but one of the defenders.[446]

[Footnote 443:  In the public Record Office, America and West Indies, LXXXII., is a manuscript map showing the positions of such of these posts as were north of Virginia.  They are thirty-five in number, from the head of James River to a point west of Esopus, on the Hudson.]

[Footnote 444:  Colonial Records of Pa., VII. 76.]

[Footnote 445:  Washington to Morris,—­April, 1756.]

[Footnote 446:  Colonial Records of Pa., VII. 232, 242; Pennsylvania Archives, II. 744.]