But before I continue the account of our voyage home to our native country, I shall just make a short retrospection on the consequences that attended the loss of Oswego, as appeared to us and the rest of the people at Quebec, who knew that part of America to which this important place was a safeguard.

As soon as Oswego was taken, our only communication from the Mohawk's river to the lake Oneida was stopt up, by filling the place at Wood's Creek with great logs and trees for many miles together.

A few days afterwards, the forts at the great carrying place, and then our most advanced post into the country of the Six Nations, which I have before given a short account of, (and where there were at that time above three thousand men, including one thousand two hundred bateaux-men and which still gave the Six Nations some hopes that we would defend their country against the French), were abandoned and destroyed, and the troops which were under the command of General Webb retreated to Burnet's Field, and left the country and the Six Nations to the mercy of the enemy.

The French, immediately after the taking of Oswego, demolished, as is said before, all the works there, and returned with their prisoners and booty to Ticonderago, to oppose our provincial army under the command of General Winslow, who had shamefully been kept, in expectation of the dilatory arrival of Lord Loudon, from attacking Crown Point while the enemy were weak, and it was easily in our power to have beat them.

The consequences of the destruction of our forts at the great carrying place, and General Webb's retreating to Burnet's Field, is now, alas! too apparent to every one acquainted with American affairs. The Indians of the Six Nations undoubtedly looked upon it as abandoning them and their country to the French, for they plainly saw that we had no strong hold near them, and that (by the place at Wood's Creek being stopped) we could not, if we would, afford them any assistance at Onondago, Cayuga, and the Senekea's country, which were their chief castles; that the forts begun by us in those countries were left unfinished, and therefore could be of no use to them, and which, if we had kept the carrying place we might have finished, and given them still hopes of our being able to defend.

But despairing of our being further serviceable to them, those Iroquois, who were before our friends, and some of the others, have indeed deserted us, and the consequences of such their junctions with the French was soon after felt in the loss of Fort

George on Lake Sacrament.

The fine country on the Mohawk's river down to

Albany, was by this step left open to the ravages of the enemy, and an easy passage opened to the

French and their Indians into the provinces of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, by the way of Susquehana and Delaware rivers, which were before covered by our settlements on the Mohawk's river, and the Six Nations.

It was Dutch and English military policy from the 1630s through 1814 to always, and without hesitation, abandon Indian allies whenever there was the slightest doubt of victory. The Indians regarded this as cowardly and also with disbelief. However, it was bedrock Indian management policy, which aimed to both use and dispose of the Indians at the very same time and it worked.

The Iroquois nations lived in palisaded villages. However, these were not banked with earth or constructed to resist cannon fire in any of the ways described by Peter concerning the siege works of the French at Oswego, which was typical of coastal European forts. These were excellent for resisting rifle and bow and arrow armed invaders, but were worse than useless against artillery. The design of these forts were sophisticated and were very similar to what we moderns imagine as the log forts of the American frontier [which may have been based on Indian structures], only with the addition of a raised mound for a base, a moat, obstacles covering the embankment, an outer fence above the moat, and an inner fence on the interior surrounding the houses.

The difference in European and Indian forts in the Eastern Woodlands was that Indians only fortified their communities, whereas the Europeans generated enough surplus food and material to build “bachelor” forts for soldiers in the interior and on non-productive frontiers, eventually gaining control of the trails and river systems. The only exception seems to have been the Mississippian Indians [who practiced intensive agriculture and generated surpluses] who built suicide forts in the early 1540s in an attempt to stop Soto’s army.