epic battles pit colonial powers, their allies

The Battles of La Prairie

Two hours before sunup on August 1, 1691, Major Peter Schuyler and his troops made their Protestant Christian prayers while Lawrence and his fellow Mohawks paid tribute to their Great Spirit, Hawenneyu, and asked for protection in the coming fight. The Mohawks and Mahicans then fastened white ribbons, strips of linen, and tree bark to their hair so they could be distinguished from the enemy warriors in the heat of battle. After checking their weapons and making sure their powder was dry, the Anglo-Indian war party set off to the west at the quick step toward La Prairie. Less than one mile from the fort, still immersed in inky predawn blackness, the men removed their knapsacks so they could move forward swiftly and unimpeded for the assault on the fort and adjacent encampment.

Perched on the overbank of the St. Lawrence, Fort La Prairie served as Captain Louis-Hector de Callière’s headquarters. The French commander’s Canadian militia and Algonquin, Wendat, and Odawa warriors were bivouacked on the east side of the fort, on the gently sloping floodplain near the river’s edge between the fort and a small stream with a nearby windmill that served as a lookout post. His French regulars from the vaunted Troupes de la Marine (Free Companies of the Marine), trained by seasoned officers, were encamped farther away on a small hill on the grassy plain, on the west side of the stockade. After being in a heightened state of alert and on the lookout for Schuyler’s column for several days without any sighting of the enemy, the French soldiers and militia had warning fatigue and their guard was down.

The night of July 31–August 1 was also unusually dark and rainy, which gave Schuyler an added advantage. With still no word on the whereabouts of the enemy, many of the French regulars and Canadian militia had taken shelter inside the fort, and the officers had failed to post sufficient sentinels. Moreover, the men were well supplied with brandy, which during the cold and wet night they had indulged in “freely.” Further undermining their combat readiness, their experienced commander Callière remained bedridden with fever inside the fort and was in no condition to rally his men if attacked.

On silent boots and moccasins, Schuyler and his assault force moved stealthily through the cornfields east of the fort, paralleling the burbling St. Lawrence, before angling into the streambed a quarter of a mile from the fort. An hour before daybreak, as they pushed down the incised alluvial channel, a French sentry posted at the windmill spotted vague figures coming toward him. “Qui vive?” he demanded. When he received no answer, he quickly signaled the fort by igniting a preprepared warning fire, squeezed off a round with his loaded musket that took the life of a Mohawk warrior, and shouted “To arms!” as he attempted to reload his musket.

But before he could crack off a second round, he was killed by one of the New York militiamen and his body was left hanging “half in and half out of the window.” Though he had put up a valiant effort to alert his comrades, his warning proved too late to make a difference as Lawrence and his Mohawks in the vanguard swarmed into the riverside encampment of the Canadian militia and Indigenous allies, with Schuyler’s New Yorkers and Etowaucum and his Mahicans right on their heels. Already on top of the enemy when the warning signal was given, Lawrence and his lead element of warriors rushed in with muskets, tomahawks, and war clubs, screaming at the top of their lungs and catching the enemy completely by surprise.

As Schuyler’s muscular force swarmed in a body upon Callière’s French Canadians and Indian allies, they quickly dispatched more than a dozen of the enemy with muskets and hand-to-hand weaponry. With most of the enemy warriors sleeping under their canoes to shelter themselves from the drizzling rain, six of the unfortunates mowed down early in the bout included members of an Odawa trade convoy encamped on the nearby strand. Running for their lives, the surviving Canadian militiamen, Algonquins, Wendats, and Odawas made a mad dash for the French regulars and the safety of the fort.

By this time, the French infantrymen on the west side of Fort La Prairie, roused by the battle cries and thunderous musket fire, sprang to arms and quick-marched toward the overrun encampment. With Callière still gravely ill and confined to his bed inside the fort, the troops were led by Captain Jean Louis Jadon de Saint-Cirque, an old war horse who had commanded a battalion in Sicily and fought all along the Canadian frontier. Although Saint-Cirque and his professional foot soldiers marched to the rescue in good military order, in the still-faint predawn light they were unable to make out whether the hazy silhouettes before them were the English enemy or their own men. Not wanting to incur collateral damage, they hesitated for several minutes by forming up instead of charging forward to drive off the attackers.

Their indecisiveness would prove costly as Schuyler quickly commanded his non-regular backwoods New Yorkers, Mohawks, and Mahicans to form an orderly firing line. They swiftly unleashed a furious volley that made the vaunted Free Companies of the Marine wish they had undergone more extensive drilling by their officers, dropping fifty Frenchmen to the ground like stringless marionettes. Among them was Saint-Cirque, who was mortally wounded by a piping-hot lead musket ball that struck his thigh and severed an artery. Along with him, four of his senior officers were instantly killed or mortally wounded, including Captains Desquérat and d’Hosta, also veterans of European campaigns. Suffering heavy losses and now dangerously short of experienced officers, the French fell back in disorder. But unbeknownst to Schuyler, the enemy outnumbered him more than two to one and the reeling survivors were able to quickly recover from the blistering fusillade and countercharge en masse.

Now it was Schuyler and Lawrence who were forced to take flight and reform in the more favorable terrain of the streambed to make a stand. In his journal account of the battle, Schuyler captures the frantic back-and-forth attacks and counterattacks as the first streaks of sunlight pierced the overhanging cloud cover:

[There were] 420 men lying outside the Fort ready to receive us, [and] they charged us so hard to force a retreat of 150 yards, where there happened a ditch [the streambed], which our men possessed themselves of. The French advancing so far in their full body were well received, and lost many of their men. We drove them back but they rallied and advanced a second time toward the ditch and fired upon us, but did us no damage. Instantly our people rose up and discharged upon their whole body, and killed a great many; nevertheless, they rallied the third time, but to avoid the ditch, they drove their men toward the East and thought to divide our people; then we left the ditch, fell into their rear, and then in a full body engaged them in the plain ground and fought them fairly, until we drove them into their Fort in great disorder and took three French prisoners.

By the time the desperate seesaw battle along the banks of the St. Lawrence River wound down, it was full daylight and the two opposing sides could see each other clearly. After Schuyler’s force had abandoned the streambed, shifted position farther uphill and away from the river, and taken protective cover along the edge of the woods, Lawrence and the victorious Mohawk warriors and the Mahicans waved their smoothbore trade muskets triumphantly in the air and verbally taunted the enemy. “Uttering frightful howls,” they shouted to the French that “they were not men, but dogs.” Having won the day and inflicted significant casualties, Schuyler had his men recover their knapsacks and withdrew his army in orderly fashion, while hacking down and burning the corn and hay in the fields. However, the corn was still green and soaked with rain and proved difficult to put to the torch.

As his men struggled to fire the fields, Schuyler took the opportunity to interrogate the three captured French prisoners. Under the threat of torture, they swiftly provided invaluable intelligence on the disposition of Callière’s army. The French forces consisted of 460 men total at La Prairie, the prisoners said, 40 in the fort with “the governor” and 420 outside the stockade. When questioned about the large force that had marched to Fort Chambly, the Frenchmen divulged that the trail had been made by some 300 French soldiers and 40 Francophile Native allies. This was the reconnaissance party Callière had dispatched three days earlier under the command of Captain Philippe Clément Du Vuault de Valrennes. 

For the first time, Schuyler realized just how badly he was outnumbered. Though he was pleased to have inflicted heavy enemy losses at little cost to his command, he had not anticipated encountering more than three times his own strength in his Canadian foray. Moreover, although he had suffered only a handful of casualties, he had more than a dozen wounded and had been forced to leave behind twenty-seven good fighting men at the Chambly River to guard the canoes and provisions. Thus, he quickly “resolved” to make “all haste” for the river and ordered his men to doubletime it lest they be trapped in a pincer movement by two converging armies.

However, unbeknownst to Schuyler and his trusted Native American war captains Lawrence, Onnonouagaren, Garistatsi, and Etowaucum, a trap was already being set for them and their retreating invasion force.

Like his bedridden commander Callière, Captain Valrennes had lost track of Schuyler’s column during the past three days. But by eight o’clock on the morning of August 1, he and his force of three hundred French soldiers and forty allied Wendat, Algonquin, and non-League Iroquois warriors marched quickly to the sound of the guns to cut off the withdrawing enemy. His written orders called for him to “defend” Fort Chambly in case of enemy attack, but if the English “marched against La Prairie,” he was “to follow and attack them in the rear whilst those remaining in the Camp would oppose them in front.”

The forty-four-year-old Valrennes was a tough, seasoned field officer. After committing manslaughter against a man under suspicious circumstances at the tender age of fourteen, he had managed to escape punishment, join the French army, and serve thirteen years as an officer in Normandy before crossing the Atlantic and taking his post along the Canadian frontier in 1685. Now Johnny-on-the-spot in yet another bloody backwoods engagement, he ordered his men into defensive formation on the rutted trail eight miles from La Prairie, roughly midway between the two forts.

Around nine o’clock, Lawrence and his advance Mohawk scouts came upon the French and Indian party. Valrennes had already formed up in a half-moon-shaped defensive position on a thickly forested ridge to prevent the English withdrawal. His main force was deployed in a three-deep firing line behind two huge fallen tree trunks along the crest of the hill. Flanking him on either side were Canadian militia and his Indigenous allies, who together with a smattering of French regulars occupied the dense woodlands blocking the trailhead.

Standing near Valrennes were his two top Native war leaders: the Cayuga Iroquois headman Ourehouare, the favorite of Frontenac who had served as a galley slave for two years aboard a French warship fighting the Barbary pirates; and Paul, one of the few Kahnawake Iroquois fighting alongside the French. Following Lawrence and Onnonouagaren’s peace overture the previous spring, the Kahnawakes had held back the majority of their warriors from joining Frontenac’s forces outside Montreal to protect members of their own kindred Iroquois Nation.

Crouching behind their timber “retrenchment” and the thick stand of trees, the French foot soldiers and their Wendat, Algonquin, and Laurentian Iroquois allies not only blocked Schuyler’s path to the river but possessed both the better defensive position and superior numbers. For Schuyler and Lawrence, the only consolation was the two sides were more evenly matched than at Fort La Prairie.

At the sight of the advance guard, Valrennes’s westernmost scouts opened up with their muskets on Lawrence and his warriors, who returned a brisk fire and retreated without serious loss to Schuyler coming up from behind. When the major reached the site of what is known today as the Second Battle of La Prairie, he had his men once again discard their knapsacks and performed a quick reconnaissance. He concluded that he had no choice but to push straight through the French line if he wanted to reach his canoes, for the enemy’s objective was clearly to delay his retreat and drive him back toward the superior force at Fort La Prairie, thereby trapping him between the two armies.

Assembling his New York officers and Lawrence, Onnonouagaren, Garistatsi, and Etowaucum, he bluntly told them that “there was no other choice, fight or die they must, the enemy being between us and our canoes.” With his hearty New Yorkers giving a rousing battle cry and his Indian allies thunderous war whoops, they charged “briskly” toward Valrennes and the French “half-moon,” unleashing their muskets as they dashed up the gentle hill and through the thick underbrush and trees.

But the battle-tested Valrennes remained cool under fire and ordered his sharpshooters to hold their musket volley until the enemy approached within pistol range, or twenty-five yards. Though several French foot soldiers were wounded due to the suppression of their fire until the last second, Schuyler and his men were cut to pieces by the first close-range fusillade. Thirty men fell in the initial salvo, and the survivors were sent reeling backward through the rain-soaked underbrush.

Despite the heavy losses, they quickly regrouped for a second frontal assault. However, the Mahicans had already seen enough carnage for one morning. While Etowaucum and two-thirds of his fellow warriors would keep fighting, the rest of the Mahicans withdrew hastily from the field after the charge, leaving Schuyler and his colonials and Lawrence and his League Mohawks to do the bulk of the fighting for the remainder of the battle. Yelling at the top of their lungs, the Albanians, Mohawks, and Etowaucum’s remaining Mahicans pressed forward once again through the pall of powder smoke, receiving a second measured “volley of shot” at close quarters. Onnonouagaren, Lawrence’s fellow Mohawk war captain, friend, and peace diplomat, was cut down during this desperate attempt to break the French line. According to Schuyler, most of the casualties of the two Battles of La Prairie were sustained during the first two frontal attacks against Valrennes’s strong position, with the felled trees and dense woods protecting the French officer and his men.

With the second charge, the French line bent but did not break. However, Schuyler’s Anglo-Dutch New Yorkers and Lawrence, Garistatsi, and their stalwart Mohawks regrouped and swept in again, with support provided by the Mahicans—and this time they were able to infiltrate the enemy line and “dislodge the French from their ambuscade.” The assault was so well-coordinated that dozens of the French Canadians, most of them young lads “who had never smelled powder before,” turned tail and ran like jackrabbits, abandoning their strong defensive position despite having inflicted devastating casualties and possessing superior numbers. However, their commander, Jean-Vincent Le Ber Du Chesne, quickly rallied them and they returned to the fray. But the line was broken and, despite the inspiring leadership of Valrennes and Du Chesne, as well as their Native war captains Ourehouare and Paul, the seemingly impregnable French position was overrun. Now some of the Algonquins on the French side abandoned the field along with the terror-stricken Canadians.

The battle now turned into a close-quarters frontier melee. For Schuyler, Lawrence, Garistatsi, and Etowaucum on the English side, and Valrennes, Ourehouare, and Paul on the French, there was fierce hand-to-hand fighting in every direction as a cacophony of battle cries reverberated through the dense woodlands. Men screamed, charged, wheeled, fell, fought breast to breast, and shot their pistols and muskets at such close range that they scorched the shirts of their enemies by the flash of their guns. Smoothbores, battle axes, and heavy war clubs swooshed through the air and made pulp of human heads. Musket balls flew past like swarms of locusts. The combatants on both sides materialized from the smoke like phantoms one instant only to disappear the next. Wounded men crumpled over logs and tumbled into brush, while those with mortal wounds cried for their mothers and crawled away to die. Ground would open for a moment and then close like a beating heart. It was a bloody, smoky, tangled mess.

The hand-to-hand fighting would involve multiple charges and countercharges and would last for over an hour. Frontenac himself—no shrinking violet when it came to gory combat—would later declare the Second Battle of La Prairie “the most obstinate battle that has ever been fought in Canada since the foundation of the colony.” Indeed, it proved to be not only one of the fiercest military engagements fought between England and France and their respective Native American allies in the 17th century, but one of the bloodiest engagements of the four French and Indian Wars fought on North American soil between 1689 and 1762.

It was precisely because the musketry was so deafening, the violence so visceral, and the casualties on both sides so extreme that some of the Native American warriors, as well as the green French-Canadian soldiers, abandoned the field in the heat of battle. English and French observers at the time, and even 19th-century historians like Francis Parkman, considered the French-allied Algonquins and the English-led Mahicans who abandoned the field to be guilty of cowardice. However, today we recognize that, unlike the young French Canadians who ran away out of pure “flight response,” the Indians were simply observing the northeastern Native American custom of refusing to take unacceptable battlefield casualties. As historian Daniel Richter soberingly reminds us:

In contrast to European beliefs that to perish in combat was acceptable and even honorable, Iroquois beliefs made death in battle a frightful prospect. . . . Slain warriors [were] said to be excluded from the villages of the dead, doomed to spend a roving eternity seeking vengeance. As a result, their bodies were not interred in village cemeteries, lest their angry souls disturb the repose of others. Both in burial and in the afterlife, a warrior who fell in combat faced separation from his family and friends. . . .Efforts to minimize fatalities accordingly underlay several tactics that contemporary Euro-Americans considered cowardly: fondness for ambushes and surprise attacks; unwillingness to fight when outnumbered; and avoidance of frontal assaults on fortified places. Defensive tactics showed a similar emphasis on precluding loss of life.

Taking into account the Native American wartime customs of the late 17th century, what is remarkable is that Lawrence and his Mohawks charged repeatedly in the high-mortality-rate European manner at both the First and Second Battles of La Prairie—and were reportedly the most redoubtable fighters of the day. “The Mohawks, upon no occasion, yielded an inch of ground, till the English first gave way,” wrote Cadwallader Colden, who would in the early 18th century serve as a representative to the Iroquois as colonial governor of New York. Along with Lawrence and his Mohawks, the French-allied war chiefs Ourehouare and Paul and their Canadian Iroquois and Wendat braves on the French side were recognized for their courage under enemy fire. Like Lawrence’s comrade Onnonouagaren, killed during the initial English frontal assault, the Laurentian Iroquois Paul died from injuries sustained during the battle. He was heralded by Frontenac and the French officers in their post-battle reports for his bravery in “encouraging all by word and example” during the fight. However, in the aftermath of the battle, Onnonouagaren’s and Paul’s Indigenous loved ones saw their deaths in a far different light, as they deeply mourned their losses in the traditional Iroquois manner from their respective villages.

In his journal, Schuyler captured the frantic hand-to-hand fighting and English breakthrough during the second battle that morning:

We fought stoutly one whole hour. A French captain [Valrennes] hearing me encourage our men to fight for the honor of our King and the Protestant religion, said aloud, I am here ready to answer you, but our men being resolute, fell in upon them, broke thro’ the middle of their body, until we got into their rear trampling upon their dead, then faced about upon them and fought them a pretty while close, until we made them give way, then drove them by strength of arms 400 paces before us, and to say the truth we were all glad to see them retreat.

Having driven Valrennes and what remained of his three-hundred-man French and Indian army from the field, Schuyler and his men withdrew in good order and carried their gravely wounded to the rendezvous point on the Chambly River. Because they were still deep in enemy territory and outnumbered three to one by Callière’s and Valrennes’s combined forces, they had no choice but to leave more than thirty dead behind them, an English battle flag, and most of their knapsacks, which they had thrown off at the beginning of the second contest. Upon reaching the small English fortification along the banks of the Chambly, they found the rearguard company, their canoes, and their provisions secure. Here Schuyler waited five full hours for stragglers, which enabled an additional handful of men to reach the river before the war party disembarked for the return trip to Albany.

French battlefield reports later claimed that Valrennes’s forces were too exhausted to pursue the English and that the veteran infantry captain, who had demonstrated such “calm confidence” that “his orders put heart into everyone,” had barely enough strength to tend to his own wounded. No doubt he and his brave men were battered and fatigued, but certainly far less than Schuyler and his force, who had marched and paddled their canoes more than 230 total miles, fought two desperate battles against two separate armies that together outnumbered them more than three to one, and then marched, with all their wounded and without losing a single man, ten miles back to the river. “Nothing saved them from destruction,” writes Francis Parkman, “but the failure of the French at La Prairie to follow their retreat and thus enclose them between two fires.”

Overall, Schuyler and Lawrence’s Canadian foray was a joint English-League Iroquois victory due to possession of the field and greater inflicted casualties at both the First and Second Battles of La Prairie, but it came at a steep price. Schuyler reported thirty-seven killed and thirty-one wounded out of a total force of 239 men, which excluded the small force left behind at the Chambly River that did not take part in the fighting. His original estimated dead consisted of twenty-one Englishmen, sixteen Mohawks, and six Mahicans, but six of the presumed dead were merely missing and eventually hobbled back to Albany. For the French forces, contemporary observer Sieur Benac reported forty-five killed, including two captains, six lieutenants, and five ensigns, and sixty wounded. The casualty rates for the English and French for the two battles combined were, thus, 28 percent and 13 percent, respectively. But this disparity is expected given that Schuyler commanded the smaller force and was on the offensive deep in enemy territory. All the same, he lost more than a quarter of his troops to death or injury, and he narrowly avoided being completely wiped out by a far more formidable French army.

After bagging five large elk to “refresh the whole company” on the way home, the major and his exhausted men staggered into Albany eight days later on August 9, having covered 450 miles by foot and canoe in the past three weeks. As had happened following the invasion of Canada the year before, the finger-pointing began as soon as they set foot back in town.