On the 5th, the British had nearly completed their preparations, and General Phillips had carried a road almost to the top of Sugar Hill, when General St. Clair determined to evacuate the fort.  That night he sent away his stores and baggage in more than two hundred bateaux, under convoy of five armed gallies, to Skenesborough, a town about eight miles distant, at the head of a small inlet, South Bay, which branches off from the Lake at Ticonderoga.  The troops marched to the same place, leaving more than a hundred guns behind.

Daylight showed the flight of the enemy.  Reidesel and Frazer immediately followed in pursuit, while Burgoyne embarked the rest of the army on board the squadron.  The boom and bridge, which had cost so many months of labour to complete, were presently cut through by the sailors and artificers.  The squadron were enabled to pass at nine o’clock, and at three came up with the enemy near Skenesborough Falls.  After a short resistance, two of the gallies surrendered, and the enemy set fire to the others, and to all their bateaux and stores.

Early next morning, Reidesel and Frazer overtook a strong body of the enemy, and defeated them, with the loss of their Commander, and nearly 1,000 men killed, wounded, and taken.  Another division was encountered and routed by Colonel Hill.  The fugitives escaped to Fort Edward, on the Hudson.

General Burgoyne might now have returned to Ticonderoga, and thence crossed to the head of Lake George, from which there was a waggon-road to Fort Edward, only eighteen miles distant.  But fearing that a retrograde movement might check the enthusiasm of the army, now elated with their rapid career of victory, underrating the difficulties of the country, and too much despising an enemy who had been so easily dispersed, he determined to ascend Wood Creek as far as Fort Anne, whence the direct distance to the Hudson is shorter.  He waited, therefore, a few days near Skenesborough for his tents, baggage, and provisions; employing himself, in the mean time, in clearing the navigation of Wood Creek, while his people at Ticonderoga were transporting the stores and artillery over the portages to Lake George.

The enemy offered little resistance in the advance to Fort Edward, but the difficulties of the country were almost insurmountable.  So broken was it by creeks and morasses, that it became necessary to construct more than forty bridges and causeways, one of them over a morass two miles long.  The enemy had created every possible obstruction by felling trees across the paths, and destroying the communications.  Scarcely could the army advance a mile in a day, and it was the end of July before it arrived on the Hudson.

On the approach of the British, the enemy quitted Fort Edward, and retreated to Saratoga.  All kinds of provisions and stores had already reached Fort George; but the means of transport were lamentably deficient, and the impossibility of bringing up supplies compelled the army to a fatal inaction.  On the 15th of August, after a fortnight’s incessant exertion, there were only four days’ provisions in store.