1690.] AN ENGLISH RAID. 257 



was no birch bark to make more canoes, and owing 

 to the lateness of the season the bark of the elms 

 would not peel. Such of the Iroquois as had joined 

 them were cold and sullen ; and news came that 

 the three western tribes of the confederacy, terri- 

 fied by the small-pox, had refused to move. It 

 was impossible to advance ; ^and Winthrop, the 

 commander, gave orders to return to Albany, leav- 

 ing Phips to conquer Canada alone. 1 But first, 

 that the campaign might not seem wholly futile, 

 he permitted Captain John Schuyler to make a 

 raid into Canada with a band of volunteers. Schuy- 

 ler left the camp at Wood Creek with twenty-nine 

 whites and a hundred and twenty Indians, passed 

 Lake Champlain, descended the Richelieu to Cham- 

 bly, and fell suddenly on the settlement of La 

 Prairie, whence Frontenac had just withdrawn with 

 his forces. Soldiers and inhabitants were reaping 

 in the wheat-fields. Schuyler and his followers 

 killed or captured twenty-five, including several 



1 On this expedition see the Journal of Major General Winthrop, in 

 N. Y. Col. Docs., IV. 193 ; Pub/ick Occurrences, 1690, in Historical Maga- 

 zine, I. 228; and various documents in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 727, 752, and 

 in Doc. Hist. X. Y., II. 2G6, 288. Compare La Potherie, III. 126, and N. Y. 

 Col. Docs., IX. 513. These last are French statements. A Sokoki In- 

 dian brought to Canada a greatly exaggerated account of the English 

 forces, and said that disease had been spread among them by boxes of 

 infected clothing, which they themselves had provided in order to poi- 

 son the Canadians. Bishop Laval, Lettre du 20 Nov., 1690, says that there 

 was a quarrel between the English and their Iroquois allies, who, hav- 

 ing plundered a magazine of spoiled provisions, fell ill, and thought that 

 they were poisoned. Golden and other English writers seem to have 

 been strangely ignorant of this expedition. The Jesuit Michel Germain 

 declares that the force of the English alone amounted to four thousand 

 men (Relation de la Defaite des Anglois, 1690). About one tenth of this 

 number seem actually to have taken the field. 



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