now the city of Pittsburg. Before Washington reached the place, the French had gained possession of it, and had sent a force to meet him. Washington defeated that force and built a fort for his own defense which he called Fort Necessity. This he was obliged to surrender, July 4.

20. Convention of Albany.-On that day, July 4, 1754, a convention of eight English colonies, called by the advice of the King of England for the purpose of devising measures of defense against the French, was in session in Albany, New York. The delegates there assembled renewed for the colonies their treaties of friendship with the Iroquois and adopted a Plan of Union for the colonies which was presented by Benjamin Franklin. The Plan was not accepted by the colonies nor by the king.

21. Second French and Indian War.-War between France and England was declared in 1756. Both nations had already sent troops to America. For four successive years, beginning with the declaration of war, efforts were made by the English to gain possession of Lake Champlain. Many soldiers from the New England colonies were engaged in these undertakings and so became acquainted with portions of Vermont.

22. A Military Road.-After the capture of Crown Point by the Engiish, in the summer of 1759, Capt. John Stark with two hundred rangers was sent by Gen. Amherst to cut a road from Crown Point to Charlestown, N. H. The road was completed the next year, following for the most part the Otter Creek and its largest eastern branch and the Black River.

23. Rogers' Expedition.-In September, 1759, Maj. Robert Rogers was sent from Crown Point with two hundred men against the St. Francis Indians near the mouth of the St. Francis River. He sailed down Lake Champlain and leaving his boats and provisions hidden in the bushes beside the Missisquoi Bay marched through swampy woods to his destination. The Indians were surprised in the early morning. Many were killed. The village was plundered and burned. Maj. Rogers had learned that his boats and provisions had been discovered and captured by the enemy and that he was pursued by a larger force than his own, and so he started immediately for Charlestown, N. H. A difficult march of eight days brought the little army to the neighborhood of Lake Memphremagog. They were already short of provisions. As a means of safety

the whole party was now divided into several companies and each was directed to find its way to the mouth of the Ammonoosuc River. Maj. Rogers with his company took the route along the Barton and Passumpsic rivers to the Connecticut. There he expected to find provisions. A camp was found and a fresh fire was burning in it, but the men sent had gone down the river with their provisions. Guns were fired as a signal, but the men with the provisions made the greater haste down the stream. Here Maj. Rogers left his company except three companions with whom he started down the river on a raft made of dry logs. On the second day they lost their raft at Olcott Falls, and made a new one at the foot of the falls by burning down trees and burning off logs of a suitable length. With this they kept on till they found men chopping beside the river just above Charlestown. They were helped to the fort, and provisions were at once sent to the men who had been left behind. Many of those rangers never returned. They were believed to have

died of starvation in the woods. And skeletons, guns and other remains found by early settlers near the Connecticut and Passumpsic rivers were reported as the relics of Rogers' men. After gathering up a remnant of his force Maj. Rogers returned to Crown Point.

24. Vermont in 1760.-With the retreating army in 1759, the French settlers in the Champlain valley retired to Canada. There were then a few scattered settlements near the west bank of the Connecticut River from the Massachusetts line to Bellows Falls. These, with the dwellers in the Indian village by the Lower Falls of the Missisquoi River, constituted the population of Vermont in 1760.

CHAPTER II.

FURTHER SETTLEMENTS. CONFLICTING CLAIMS.

1. Settlement of Bennington.-The township of Bennington was granted and surveyed in 1749, but the forest remained unbroken till after the conquest of Canada. Captain Samuel Robinson, returning from Lake George to his home in Massachusetts, during the French and Indian war, passed through Bennington, encamping for the night there; and was so much pleased with the country that he found the owners, purchased a portion of their rights and, with some friends, began there, in 1761, the first permanent settlement of Western Vermont. Six families, from beyond the Connecticut River, wended their way on horseback through leafy woods and beside full streams and reached Bennington June 18. Samuel Robinson had

bought wheat at Charlemont on the Deerfield River two months before, indicating that pioneers went forward to prepare as fully as possible for the necessities of the colony. In the autumn other families came, some of the: from the farthest corner of Connecticut, making up a number of thirty or forty. A mild winter followed, which was very favorable to the settlers, and which they regarded as a special interposition of the Supreme Ruler in their behalf. The settlement grew rapidly and others were made near it. In 1765 a road, a bridle path, had been surveyed and opened to Danby, where a few beginnings were made beside the branches of the Otter Creek by settlers from New York. Bennington with its one thousand inhabitants, its town organization, its mills, its militia company, its church and its schools was already a center of business and of social and political influence.

2. Settlement of Newbury.-The Coos Meadows, in Newbury, Vt., and Haverhill, N. H., of the present day, had been known for a long time. Stephen Wil; liams spent several weeks in the neighborhood in the spring of 1704. The same spring Jacob Hicks planted corn there with the Indians and shortly after died of starvation. Captain Peter Powers of New Hampshire just fifty years later found the meadows cleared and covered with grass. A few families came to these meadows in 1762. They settled on opposite sides of the Connecticut River and in different towns, but constituted one neighborhood, sixty miles distant from the nearest settlement, that of Charlestown, N. H From that place they brought provisions by boat in summer and on the ice in winter till they could raise their own supplies. The irons for the first saw-mili in Newbury were brought from Concord, N. H., nearly eighty miles distant, upon a hand-sled. It was a wild country far in the woods. One Sunday, Mrs. Mary

Kent of Newbury remained at home alone while the rest of the family went to meeting. During the time three large bears came and looked in at the open door of her cabin, and then walked away. In 1765, three years after its first settlement, Newbury was a fully organized town and in connection with Haverhill had a church and a pastor. In that year there were settlements in nearly all the towns bordering the Connecticut River on the west from Massachusetts to Newbury, and in enough of the tiers beyond to fill the gaps in the line of the river towns, and a settlement had been made in Guildhall.

3. Timothy Knox.--In some of these towns the people were few. The entire population of Woodstock at this time consisted of Timothy Knox. He had been a fellowstudent in Harvard College with Elbridge Gerry who afterwards.

signed the Decla

ration of Independence, who became

Governor of Massachusetts and Vice-President of the United States, whose virtues have been extolled in history and one of whose devices has been embalmed in the word gerrymander. Knox had a sweetheart who ceased to smile on him, upon which he desired "a lodge in some vast wilderness," went to Woodstock and built one, where he slept,