Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 6).djvu/400

 warehouses, &c., belonging to the company and to that gentleman, and retired, without molesting any other person.[219] Our canoe arrived from Fort William in the evening, with that of Mr. M'Gillivray; and on the morrow we all repaired to Saut Ste. Marie, where we saw the ruins which the enemy had left. The houses, stores, and saw-mills of the company were still smoking. {351} The schooner was at the foot of the rapids; the Americans had run her down, but she grounded on a ledge of rocks, whence they could not dislodge her, and so they had burnt her to the water's edge.

Le Saut de Ste. Marie,[220] or as it is shortly called, Saut Ste. Marie, is a rapid at the outlet of Lake Superior, and may be five hundred or six hundred yards wide; its length may be estimated at three quarters of a mile, and the descent of the water at about twenty feet. At the lower extremity the river widens to about a mile, and here there are a certain number of houses. The north bank belongs to Great Britain; the southern to the United States. It was on the American side that Mr. Johnston lived. Before the war he was collector of the port for the American govern-*

War of 1812-15. Hearing of Colonel Croghan's expedition, he armed all his men, about a hundred in number, and embarked with them for Mackinac, thus leaving his property at the mercy of Major Holmes. Johnston's son served as lieutenant on the "Queen Charlotte," and was captured by the Americans in the naval battle on Lake Erie. Bigsby, on his journey through the lakes in 1824, visited Johnston, and commented upon the value and extent of his library—"a thousand well-bound and well-selected volumes, French and English, evidently much in use, in winter especially." For further details of his career, see Masson, Bourgeois, ii, pp. 137-142.—]
 * [Footnote: in 1828. Although living on the American shore, he sided with the British in the