Page:The Hessians and the other German auxiliaries of Great Britain in the revolutionary war.djvu/156

 138 eight men, of whom six hundred and sixty-seven were left under the command of Sir Guy Carleton, and three thousand eight hundred and ninety-one accompanied the expedition under Burgoyne. This estimate does not include the Hanau chasseurs who were attached to St. Leger's expedition. The total number of white men under Burgoyne was greater than eight thousand, about two hundred and fifty of these being Provincials.

Some five hundred Indians accompanied the army, and at first did good service as scouts, and exhibited to their humane employers the scalps of American soldiers. The sight found favor in the eyes of the fashionable gentleman who commanded his majesty's army. He issued an order that deserters from his own force should be caught and scalped likewise. The savages were thought to have carried their amiable customs too far when they killed Jane McCrea, a young woman betrothed to a Tory with the British army, who had been intrusted to the protection and guidance of two of them. Burgoyne, however, did not venture to execute the murderer, for fear of “the total defection of the Indians.” Before the establishment of railways had changed the lines of travel, the principal highway between Canada, on the one hand, and New England and the more southern colonies, on the other, was the great water route, which, leaving the St. Lawrence at Lake St. Pierre, led up the Richelieu River, past Fort St. John, to Lake Champlain, and up Lake Champlain, past Crown Point, to Ticonderoga. At Ticonderoga a choice of two ways lay before the traveller, or the