Burgoyne, scenting danger, had ordered five hundred more Germans to reinforce Baum.They, too, were attacked and overwhelmed.In all Burgoyne lost some eight hundred men and four guns.The American loss was seventy.It shows the spirit of the time that, for the sport of the soldiers, British prisoners were tied together in pairs and driven by negroes at the tail of horses.An American soldier described long after, with regret for his own cruelty, how he had taken a British prisoner who had had his left eye shot out and mounted him on a horse also without the left eye, in derision at the captive's misfortune.The British complained that quarter was refused in the fight.For days tired stragglers, after long wandering in the woods, drifted into Burgoyne's camp.This was now near Saratoga, a name destined to be ominous in the history of the British army.
Further misfortune now crowded upon Burgoyne.The general of that day had two favorite forms of attack.One was to hold the enemy's front and throw out a column to march round the flank and attack his rear, the method of Howe at the Brandywine; the other method was to advance on the enemy by lines converging at a common center.This form of attack had proved most successful eighteen years earlier when the British had finally secured Canada by bringing together, at Montreal, three armies, one from the east, one from the west, and one from the south.Now there was a similar plan of bringing together three British forces at or near Albany, on the Hudson.Of Clinton, at New York, and Burgoyne we know.The third force was under General St.Leger.With some seventeen hundred men, fully half of whom were Indians, he had gone up the St.Lawrence from Montreal and was advancing from Oswego on Lake Ontario to attack Fort Stanwix at the end of the road from the Great Lakes to the Mohawk River.After taking that stronghold he intended to go down the river valley to meet Burgoyne near Albany.
On the 3d of August St.Leger was before Fort Stanwix garrisoned by some seven hundred Americans.With him were two men deemed potent in that scene.One of these was Sir John Johnson who had recently inherited the vast estate in the neighborhood of his father, the great Indian Superintendent, Sir William Johnson, and was now in command of a regiment recruited from Loyalists, many of them fierce and embittered because of the seizure of their property.The other leader was a famous chief of the Mohawks, Thayendanegea, or, to give him his English name, Joseph Brant, half savage still, but also half civilized and half educated, because he had had a careful schooling and for a brief day had been courted by London fashion.He exerted a formidable influence with his own people.The Indians were not, however, all on one side.Half of the six tribes of the Iroquois were either neutral or in sympathy with the Americans.Among the savages, as among the civilized, the war was a family quarrel, in which brother fought brother.Most of the Indians on the American side preserved, indeed, an outward neutrality.There was no hostile population for them to plunder and the Indian usually had no stomach for any other kind of warfare.The allies of the British, on the other hand, had plenty of openings to their taste and they brought on the British cause an enduring discredit.
When St.Leger was before Fort Stanwix he heard that a force of eight hundred men, led by a German settler named Herkimer, was coming up against him.When it was at Oriskany, about six miles away, St.Leger laid a trap.He sent Brant with some hundreds of Indians and a few soldiers to be concealed in a marshy ravine which Herkimer must cross.When the American force was hemmed in by trees and marsh on the narrow causeway of logs running across the ravine the Indians attacked with wild yells and murderous fire.Then followed a bloody hand to hand fight.Tradition has been busy with its horrors.Men struggled in slime and blood and shouted curses and defiance.Improbable stories are told of pairs of skeletons found afterwards in the bog each with a bony hand which had driven a knife to the heart of the other.In the end the British, met by resolution so fierce, drew back.Meanwhile a sortie from the American fort on their rear had a menacing success.Sir John Johnson's camp was taken and sacked.The two sides were at last glad to separate, after the most bloody struggle in the whole war.St.Leger's Indians had had more than enough.About a hundred had been killed and the rest were in a state of mutiny.Soon it was known that Benedict Arnold, with a considerable force, was pushing up the Mohawk Valley to relieve the American fort.Arnold knew how to deal with savages.He took care that his friendly Indians should come into contact with those of Brant and tell lurid tales of utter disaster to Burgoyne and of a great avenging army on the march to attack St.Leger.
The result was that St.Leger's Indians broke out in riot and maddened themselves with stolen rum.Disorder affected even the soldiers.The only thing for St.Leger to do was to get away.He abandoned his guns and stores and, harassed now by his former Indian allies, made his way to Oswego and in the end reached Montreal with a remnant of his force.
