Fort William Henry: The Massacre on Lake George

At the southern end of Lake George, where the water narrows before reaching the portage to the Hudson, the British built a fort in the fall of seventeen fifty-five that would survive exactly two years.

Fort William Henry was constructed on the orders of Sir William Johnson after his victory at the Battle of Lake George in September of that year. Military engineer William Eyre designed it in the Vauban style, a star-shaped bastioned earthwork with log facings and earthen fill making its walls thirty feet thick. It was meant to control the lake corridor, the main highway between French Canada and British New York, and to anchor any British push northward toward Fort Carillon at Ticonderoga.

In August of seventeen fifty-seven, the Marquis de Montcalm arrived at the southern shore with roughly eight thousand men, French regulars, Canadian militia, and Indigenous warriors from more than thirty nations, the largest military force yet assembled in North America west of the Atlantic seaboard. Lieutenant Colonel George Monro commanded the fort's garrison of twenty-three hundred. After six days of siege and bombardment, with no relief column coming from Fort Edward fourteen miles south, Monro surrendered on August ninth.

Montcalm granted generous terms: the British could march out with full military honors, retaining their personal effects, on the condition they not take up arms for eighteen months. What happened the next morning shattered that arrangement.

As the column of British soldiers, camp followers, women, and children began their march south on August tenth, warriors from Montcalm's Indigenous allies attacked them. Between fifty and one hundred seventy-four people were killed and hundreds more taken captive. Montcalm rode into the melee trying to stop it, reportedly tearing open his coat and offering his own chest.

The massacre reverberated across the British colonies, becoming a rallying cry and deepening the racial fury that characterized the frontier war. Fort William Henry was burned. The site is now a reconstruction and museum at the edge of Lake George village.