With no accurate information on the whereabouts of General Montgomery’s Northern Army, Colonel Arnold dispatched Lieutenant Aaron Burr and five of Lieutenant Steele’s scouts up the St. Lawrence toward Montreal to guide General Montgomery to where we are preparing to assault Quebec City. While we await their return, Colonel Arnold and Captain Morgan have us busy collecting birch-bark and dugout canoes to replace the batteaux lost on the long journey.

Of equal importance we are slowly buying replacement muskets, powder, and shot for weapons lost aboard crashed batteaux and manufacturing scaling ladders and iron-tipped pikes for when we strike.

Endnotes

1. During the late eighteenth century, the most widely accepted coin circulating in the American Colonies was the Spanish silver dollar consisting of 387 grains of pure silver. The dollar was divided into “pieces of eight,” each consisting of one-eighth of a dollar. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the Spanish dollar was the most stable and least debased coin in the Western world.

2. Uses promptos facit; Latin for “Use makes perfect.” The modern idiom, “Practice makes perfect.”

3. “Pioneers” in eighteenth-century armies were soldiers equipped for specialized engineering and construction tasks such as field fortifications, military camps, roads, and bridges.

At Fort Halifax, Colonel Arnold directed Lieutenant Colonel Enos to designate fifty members of the Fourth Division to serve as pioneers for the Expedition and acquire appropriate equipment—a significant challenge in the remote Maine wilderness.

Chapter Thirteen: 1775: Quebec—Setting the Stage for Battle

Chapter Thirteen

1775: QUEBEC—SETTING THE STAGE FOR BATTLE

Thus far in this chronological record, I have relied only on my own contemporaneous notes. In short, it reflects what I knew at the time I wrote it down. Activities and events prior to my appointment as Captain Morgan’s Adjutant are from entries in my personal diaries. All subsequent information—from Monday, April 24th, 1775, the day I became Rifle Company ­Adjutant—through Thursday, November 9th, 1775 are from Official Rifle Company Journals and Logs (numbered 1–15). These official records were preserved by passing them initially to Charles Mynn Thruston and later to Captain (and subsequently, Major) Hans Christian Febiger, the Arnold Expedition’s Adjutant. He, in turn, relayed my journals and logbooks numbered 1–15 (along with official documents from the Adjutants of other expedition units) back to Fort Western and thence to Continental Army Headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

On Friday, November 10th, 1775, I began making entries in Journal #16. Due to the terrible tragedy on the night of December 31st, 1775 volume #16 of our Official Rifle Company Journal has never been recovered. Therefore, the chronological record of events below is derived from my recollections and the testimony of other eye-witness participants, compiled, in some cases, months or even years after the activity being chronicled.

Whether this makes the record below more or less accurate than my sole contemporaneous note-taking, I leave for others to decide. What’s certain is the record from Friday, November 10th, 1775 forward, has been shaped by others’ memories and supplemented with ex post facto knowledge.1